What made you start playing mandolin?

[Barb Friedland]

I thought it might be interesting to jam on how we came to be mandolin pickers- whether we came to it from another instrument, whether we play as hobbyists or do paid gigs.

Here's my story- I have been a closet musician most of my life and started out as a classically trained oboist. I left that behind and focused on playing fingerstyle guitar- on and off. Fast forward about 25 years. I was playing and singing one night at a local open stage and ended up being adopted by a local BG band because they liked my voice and wanted to build three part harmonies. Since they already had a guitar player, we decided that I should learn mandolin. I've been playing now with them for a couple of years and love it. Our practice sessions are one of the high points of my week. We are beginning to get more paying gigs now, which makes playing even more fun.

What's your story?

[Fliss]

When I was in my teens, there was an old Portuguese-style mandolin lying around the house. It had been given to my father, but neither he nor anyone else played it. I thought it was a lovely thing, and although I hadn't a clue how to play it, I would sometimes get it down and clean it, and just enjoy looking at it and handling it. Eventually I bought some new strings and a tutor book and started to learn to play it. I played for a few years at a basic level, then gave it up until I re-started a few years ago. I'm still just a hobbyist - have played in an ensemble, but now usually play in singarounds and sessions at the folk club. That old mandolin is still a nice, and very playable, instrument. I passed it on to my friends' children in the hope that it will have the same effect on them one day.

Fliss

[Tripp Johnson]

I started a weekly jam 5 1/2 years ago...at first there were too many guitars (like most jams) so I thought I'd pick up the mandolin. My wife (clawhammer banjo) and I started obsessing over old-time music and I in turn, began obsessing over playing those tunes/that style on mandolin.

I must say however, the more I get into old-time music, the less I care about the instrument itself. Instead I'm concentrating more on the tunes themselves and the overall sound, on whatever instrument I'm playing.
Such is the nature of ot music I suppose...

[onassis]

Like many, I started playing guitar in college, strictly electric, punk and rock. In high school, I had been a band nerd, but now I wanted to be a rocker. Played in variuos bands, never got that good but always had a blast. Eventually, it was just too much work to keep bands going, so no music for years. Then, met a friend who was also an ex-rocker who'd gotten inti acoustic stuff, so I got an acoustic guitar so we could play together. That got me excited about music again, got my courage up, went to an open mic, learned this same venue also had a regular wed nite jam, started going to that. Got comfortable there, bought a $200 mando on whim just to give a little flavor to the jam (the usual all-guitar orchestra, I was far from the best guitarist, so why not find another voice to add?).
It didn't take long to learn enough chords to play along in G or D, then a few more chords and I could play in A or C. I was surprised by how easy it was to noodle around on the mando, making up little melodies that sounded like fiddle tunes. Eventually, I made up my own little "scales" that allowed me to play lead lines in variuos keys.
I've been surprised by how much faster progress has been on the mando than on the guitar. It semms to make a lot more sense. Anyhoo, it's such a blast that I don't ever see myself giving it up!

[tnbluegrasser]

I started playing piano in 8th grade, doing mostly Texas Honky-Tonk music with my Dad and his friends. Fast forward MANY years when I met my beautiful wife, who grew up singing Bluegrass and had just started learning BG guitar. I played piano to her guitar and singing Bluegrass, but it didn't quite seem right. So...I simply picked the smallest Bluegrass related instrument as I had grown weary of lugging around electric keyboards, amps, etc. The result...I fell in love with both my wife and the mandolin at the same time. The rest is, as they say, history. It is truly a blessing to be able to play and sing music with your wife.

[LKN2MYIS]

Played the guitar for 20 years, just strumming. Then learned Piedmont-style blues. Realized that, while I could learn to play anything note for note, I lacked the imagination to expand on that.

Back in 1972(?), I saw Ry Cooder play at a club in Roslyn, N.Y. called 'My Father's Place'. Shortly after I ran to Mandolin Brothers and bought a 1916
Gibson Model "A".

In those days the only material to learn from was the Sam Bush 6 cassette tape set being sold by Homespun. Bought it, and it lost me. Played a bunch of chords I could figure out. Found a local teacher who insisted I learn bluegrass, which I'm not a fan of. Put the mandolin down. Sold it many years later.

Stumbled upon this site. Started to realize the wealth of information and teaching material available. Remembered the sounds that brought me to the instrument (very unique and moving to me). Decided to, as an adult, make a serious attempt.

And here I am. Finding the instrument MUCH more enjoyable to learn than guitar, and I love the idea that there is so much to grasp and apply. I'm even starting to read music and understand theory, stuff I avoided on the guitar.

Still have some great guitars, but it's the mandolin for me.

[mandolooter]

guitar players

[fredfrank]

The devil made me do it. It was an evil plot to drain my bank account.

[tree]

For me it was the curves, scroll, points and sunburst . . . I'm a complete sucker for the f-style design. The petite size is also part of the appeal, and to seal the deal, the first person I remember seeing play one in person was Grisman, back in '78 or '79 at Memorial Hall at UNC. YOW!

I never actually played or owned an f-style until 6 years ago, when I became the mandolin player in a band by default (otherwise there would be 3 guitar players). THAT was the best thing that every happened to my pickin' because it pushed me pretty hard to learn, yet in a very forgiving environment.

[JEStanek]

I played French Horn from 6-9th grade. Never learned scales or any theory. It was either never taught or I never paid attention. I never really wanted to play guitar but played some mean air guitar, even with a racquet ball racquet. About 8 years ago we had to take a public speaking/presentation course at work and one of my colleagues did his presentation on the guitar, he gave lessons on the side. He said it wasn't too hard to learn, and was a good way to relax.

About the same time I was volunteering for the first time at the Philadelphia Folk Festival and got to hang out after the Saturday night shows for the jam sessions at the hotel. That year Nickel Creek and The Wayfaring Strangers played fest. I sat right behind Chris Thile and next to Matt Glazer and watched them play off each other. It was great, they made it look so easy. If I had only known I was behind the shoulders of giants! I decided to give the mandolin a whirl. Here I am today, not much better but still really enjoying the time I spend on the mandolin. My tastes have morphed somewhat, I never really wanted to be a bluegrass player, I like Old Time music and cyclical fiddle tunes. I enjoy playing traditional Episcopalian Hymns, and Renaissance music but this isn't necessarily what I like to listen to the most!

Jamie

[Amandalyn]

Started playing guitar early on, later came back to it as an adult when I got into bluegrass and acoustic music. There was so many guitar players, and I found it difficult to play lead. I thought mandolin would be different and was intrigued by the sound. It has become my favorite instrument.

[HackMando]

I have always wanted to play an instrument just never took the time to learn as I was too busy playing ball instead of being in the band or taking any type of lessons. I have no musical background or skills at all. I recently turned 40 and can no longer run around like I used to do. I got hooked on Alison Krauss back in the early 90's and started paying attention to other bluegrass bands and always loved the sound of the mandolin. Went to see a Sierra Hull show about 6 weeks ago and was just blown away, so the next day I went to the local music shop and bought a cheap one just to see if I would like it and be able to learn something. I am now obsessed and probably do more harm than good by dinking around with it all the time. Can you practice too much? Anyway, as soon as I get a clear full 4 finger G chord I'm gonna go hopefully buy something semi decent.

[catmandu2]

ADHD. But, aside from that...it is one of the coolest instruments..

[Jonmiller]

"Wake up Maggie I think I have something to say to you"- and my dad had an old bowlback.

[Wesley]

I liked David Lindleys violin playing on Jackson Brownes records and figured the mandolin was a good bridge instrument between the violin and guitar which I already played. I also liked Ry Cooders use of mandolin on his records and thought it would be nice to be able to play that way too. I'm still trying to get there. And who knows - maybe I'll get a violin someday.

[Denny Gies]

After being sick of me lying around on the floor playing air guitar with Led Zeppelin my wife bought me an acoustic guitar. Then she turned me on to bluegrass with the Will The Circle Be Unbroken album back in the '70's. I fell in with a group playing bluegrass and eventually there were too many guitars. Since I seemed to be the worst guitar player I decided to give the mandolin a try; plus it gave some variety to the band. After three tries, I finally got the mando for life and have no plans on looking back. The Cafe remains a hoot, a holler and educational. Thanks Scott.

[Bertram Henze]

Traumatized by classic musicians as parents, forced to learn to play the violin (wait, that's wrong, it should read: forced to learn to torment innocent people with the violin), I stopped playing altogether after finishing school.

Later, became a lover of Irish music and wanted to be able to play that. Saw a cheap Portugese mandolin in a shop, liked the looks and bought it. Found out it was tuned like the violin and I could reuse my left hand routine. That purchase was the second best decision in my life.

Bertram

[Dannibal]

Howdy. In my last year of high school (many years ago) I stopped at a small storefront around the corner from my house. The proprietor was a pratitioner of something occult and she offered "readings." She was selling everything and moving to Jerusalem and had an old mandolin in the window (a 1920's Mellowtone). I knew it was a mandolin, but that was all. I walked in and asked the price; I had $7 dollars, which was, apparently, enough.

The next year, for some reason, I took it with me to my tiny College dorm room. After I unpacked I heard music from outside - a banjo and a guitar and went out to say hello. The two fellows said that they were playing bluegrass, but needed a mandolin player to make it sound right....

[instrumentality]

Started piano lessons at age 7 and did that for 10 years. Loved it but was constantly frustrated by my lack of a "portable" instrument and the lack of piano sections in school bands/orchestras. Got around that somewhat by playing the xylophone (yes really) in junior high band, accompanying my high school chorus on piano, and teaching myself the baritone horn in the 11th grade. Simultaneously got sick of playing bass lines and fell in love with Irish and folk music, contra dancing, etc. Decided I should learn the fiddle, but got delayed by a year of bad classical violin lessons in college. Took up choral singing instead. Got too busy with school and then with life to try to pick up the fiddle again until I was 23. That was about 4 years ago. I took lessons off and on for a few years, and then got serious about it about a year and half ago. From there it was the cool sound, portability, relatively low volume, and the option to learn fiddle tunes in a different way that led me to the mandolin. I'm now awaiting my first mando purchase...should be here in a couple of weeks!

[Caleb]

I knew I wanted to play mandolin the first time I heard Kate Rusby's album Underneath the Stars. There's a song on there called The White Cockade that has a very beautiful, yet simple mandolin intro. The mandolin part is very understated, but the simplicity and the beauty of it hit me hard. Within a few weeks I had found this place, and a few weeks later I had my first mandolin. That was in 2006. I'm glad I found the mandolin, and I'm glad I waited till I was an adult to start playing. Something tells me that if I had started as a kid I wouldn't have really "gotten it."

[billkilpatrick]

the charango.

[Jim MacDaniel]

The devil made me do it. It was an evil plot to drain my bank account.

To the contrary, MAS is good for the economy. ;)

[Elliot Luber]

Back in 1972(?), I saw Ry Cooder play at a club in Roslyn, N.Y. called 'My Father's Place'. Shortly after I ran to Mandolin Brothers and bought a 1916 Gibson Model "A".

My Father's Place... what a GREAT club that was! It was once a bowling alley there underneath the Northern Boulevard Roslyn overpass, and the long tables were taken right from the wooden lanes. Saw a lot of now-classic shows there over the years. My wife grew up near there. Wrote my first music review for Good Times magazine after seeing Aztec Two-Step play there.

[Nighttrain]

I've been playing the guitar since the mid 60's. Over the years when I've had the opportunity to sit in with other bands (they are always guitar rich) and they already had a bass player (my second instrument) I would get my capo out just to add another layer to the song. People would tell me afterwards that it sounded like I was playing the mandolin. So after many years I thought maybe I sould look into this mandolin thing. Now the mandolin is fast becoming my first love. I guess I got bit by the mando bug !

[mandopete]

David Grisman.

[Capt. E]

I have always fooled around with instruments from saxaphone and clarinet, to flute and penny whistle, with harmonica and a bit of guitar always around. Photography dominated my free time, though. I became a professional level amature black and white artist using 4x5, 8x10 view cameras as well as 35mm. It got to a point where I didn't have the 3 hours plus to spend in the darkroom and music reared its beautiful head again. Then I discovered the cajun style one-row diatonic accordion. It was love at first squeeze, but within a year I became a bit frustrated by the melodic limitations of playing only in C and other keys with missing notes. You can fill in with chords etc, but... The guitar had never grabbed me for some reason, but then I encountered a used Flatiron in a music shop. Neat, but it disappeared while I was thinking about spending over $800. Then came the Mid-Missouri MO in the pawn shop. I loved the look of it. So minimal and "folky". I did research here on the cafe among other places and realized it was a good buy at $300. That was March 2008 and I have never looked back. Don't have the Mid-Mo anymore (bad decision to sell it), but my Bighorn more than makes up for it. Still play the accordion (that is also rather addictive), but now my musical range has expanded exponentially. Wish I had started on this road 40 years ago, but it is never too late.

[LKN2MYIS]

I pretty much grew up there. Kitchen next to the stage - wild. Saw Aztec there as well, plus Jorma, Bromberg, Tracy Nelson, Larry Corryell, and dozens of others. A wonderful place run by "Eppy". I was sorry to see it close.

And I have a recording of that Cooder concert from there.

And they used to have Sunday afternoon 'folk' concerts. Had the priviledge to drink with Van Ronk, laugh with Bert Jansch, and just love it.




My Father's Place... what a GREAT club that was! It was once a bowling alley there underneath the Northern Boulevard Roslyn overpass, and the long tables were taken right from the wooden lanes. Saw a lot of now-classic shows there over the years. My wife grew up near there. Wrote my first music review for Good Times magazine after seeing Aztec Two-Step play there.

[swampy]

i joined a bluegrass group that already had a guitar player, and since I had a mandolin around I was more or less forced into it. Within 6 months I was absolutely smitten.

[SternART]

David Grisman

[MT_player]

The Garcia/Grisman collaborations. I got into these because I love Jerry and the Dead but I wound up becoming fascinated by the sound of the mandolin. About three years ago I was getting ready to go to Greece for my honeymoon and I was skeptical about bringing my guitar along. Since I can't seem to go more than a few hours without some kind of musical instrument in my hands, I picked up a cheap Washburn mandolin at Sam Ash for $200 and off I went to Greece.

I cut my teeth (and fingertips) on this instrument for about a year at which point I decided to upgrade. I took a ride out to Mandolin Bros on Staten Island and bought a sweet Collings MT.

Now, I play mandolin all the time in various styles with a few different bands. It really gave my playing career a boost because there are a million guitar players where I live and only a few mandolins around. This means more invites to jam and gig which keeps me smilin'

[clarksavage]

Went to see Captain Beefheart back in about 1971. Only cost a few bucks. Some guy named Ry Cooder played before him (what a lineup !?!) Ry sat on a little stool in the middle of the stage with that little mandolin and used some sort of slide to make it sing. I was hooked.

My grandfather left a Weyman mandolin-banjo with my dad, no one was interested in it so it became mine. Off I went.....

Clark

[Mike Bromley]

I saw a young fellow named Louis Benoit play a tune he called "Benny's Breakdown" (basically "Daybreak in Dixie") with his now-deceased father Jarvis Benoit at a bluegrass festival in Nova Scotia in 1975. I looked at the mandolin and thought: "I wanna do THAT!!!"

So began an interesting journey on the cheerful little species of the Italian National Bird.

[mandotrout777]

I played guitar for about 20 years, completely self-taught, rock and blues type stuff. I wasn't ever all that good but enjoyed the heck out of it. About 10 or 11 years ago I went to a Leftover Salmon show in Colorado. Drew Emmitt was the first person I ever heard play Mandolin live and it blew me away. Interestingly I gravitated away from the jam band thing and back towards traditional bluegrass (although I still listen to Salmon, Yonder, Railroad Earth, Sam Bush type stuff). I finally picked up and mandolin a few years ago and have been lovin' it ever since. I'm 46 now. I wish I would have started this thing 30 years ago. I might have been pretty good by now.

[David Anderson]

Went to see Captain Beefheart back in about 1971. Only cost a few bucks. Some guy named Ry Cooder played before him (what a lineup !?!) Ry sat on a little stool in the middle of the stage with that little mandolin and used some sort of slide to make it sing. I was hooked.

My grandfather left a Weyman mandolin-banjo with my dad, no one was interested in it so it became mine. Off I went.....

Clark

I saw that 1971 Captain Beefheart/Ry Cooder tour also, but in a small club in Houston. Cooder really impressed me with his playing then, but it was a good 36+ years later before I bought my first mandolin.

[catmandu2]

Shoulda woulda coulda. Be thankful you have one in your hands now.

[catmandu2]

I wish I had seen Don VV and Ry!

[viv]

1. hearing bob doyle & the buffalo chipkickers play "shady grove" when i was about 10 or 11. i fell completely in love with the song and the way that thing that wasn't a guitar sounded....a wondrous thing.
2. my dad, though he never had one til i was much older.
3. misters o'brien, grisman, bush, thile, steffey, frazier, and my friend the cat, respectively.

"o great and powerful sammy bush...o pick it...pick it...play that whacky 8 string ma-han-DOE-ho-liiiiiiin!".....pastor mustard

[woodwizard]

Bill Monroe and Bluegrass. Once you get it there's no cure.

[mandopete]

David Grisman

That's two of us.

Hey Art - check out the Mando Dawgs Social Group (http://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/group.php?groupid=74) - woof!

[Steve Conley]

I'm still in the process of starting. Just ordered my first mandolin!

I played French horn in middle school and high school and I loved making music but I never liked the way I sounded on the horn, plus brass instruments don't really lend themselves to quiet noodling around. So for 20 years after high school I never really did anything musical other than listening. Tried to get into keyboards a few times but it just didn't click for me enough to stick with it.

Then last fall I started Suzuki violin with my daughter (in Suzuki, one parent has to do it along with the kid) and I found myself really enjoying it. We switched from Suzuki to traditional violin instruction after a couple of months but I decided to keep up with the violin. However, it's hard to sit back and play the violin for relaxation, at least at the level I'm at (screeeeetch, screeeetch), plus my five year old is starting to sound a lot better than me even on her little 1/8th size violin, which is awesome as a parent but a little discouraging as a player, so I decided I needed my own instrument that I could learn and play along with her (still gonna try and stick with the violin, too).

I really like medieval and renaissance music but the lute looked pretty intimidating! The mandolin seems to have the sound that I associate with early music, plus I remember looking at mandolins in the Sears catalog (or maybe it was JCPenny) when I was a little kid and wanting one just because it looked so neat. It certainly helps that it is GDAE just like the violin. I listened to some of Allen and Aleksandra Alexander's medieval mandolin music and I was hooked.

My wife managed to get me to hold off for a while by giving me her dad's old Giannini Craviola 6-string guitar to play around with (it almost looks like some kind of weird CBOM) and I've been building up calluses with it but I think it just made me want a mandolin even more because for some reason it was just hard for me to wrap my mind around the tuning (maybe I'll try NST some day) and I wanted something a little smaller. It did really help me start to understand music theory a little by actually seeing the scales as linear intervals rather than a sequence of black and white keys.

So I read these forums a lot and based on that I ordered a Kentucky KM-174 from Folkmusician.com just last night. I'm really excited! :mandosmiley:

[jimbob]

:mandosmiley:It's much lighter than my ole RB-250 !

[Mattg]

I built a mandolin at Rocky Grass Academy. Had never played one before.

I had been playing guitar for a few decades and then started building. A friend suggested that I go to and build a mandolin so I did.

I fell in love with the mandolin and actually playing bluegrass at the same time. The whole BG fest ghetto camp jam scene really illustrated how accessable BG is for anyone who wants to play it.

When I started noodling with my new mandolin, the light switched on. That was 5 years ago. Haven't stopped playing.

[Chris Rogers]

I've played guitar for about 35 years, and still play rhythm in a blues band. Started singing folk music with my wife several years ago, and teaching her guitar. Last June we went to the Kate Wolf Festival in Mendocino County, CA, our first exposure to the all-night jam tradition at festivals. Just as several of you have commented, there were armies of guitars, and I was compelled to capo up to escape the mush of open chords. Then someone came by with a mandolin, and it was like a ray of light from the heavens. Now there's sonething different, I thought. The mando player said "it's just like a guitar but upside down", and that was the key I needed to unlock the door. Bought my first Kentucky 505 a few weeks later, just replaced it with a KM-1000. My wife took over the guitar full time, and we are playing once or twice a week in BG jams and house parties. The blues thing is approaching afterthought status.

[Jim MacDaniel]

Iain Macleod's playing with Shooglenifty...

[onassis]

1. hearing bob doyle & the buffalo chipkickers play "shady grove" when i was about 10 or 11. i fell completely in love with the song and the way that thing that wasn't a guitar sounded....a wondrous thing.
2. my dad, though he never had one til i was much older.
3. misters o'brien, grisman, bush, thile, steffey, frazier, and my friend the cat, respectively.

"o great and powerful sammy bush...o pick it...pick it...play that whacky 8 string ma-han-DOE-ho-liiiiiiin!".....pastor mustard

I read somewhere that Michelle Shocked did her "Arkansas Traveler" album as something of a tribute to her father, who musically inspired his kids by taking up the mandolin at the age of 35.

[HackMando]

plus my five year old is starting to sound a lot better than me even on her little 1/8th size violin, which is awesome as a parent but a little discouraging as a player




I know what you mean. My 2 boys have been doing suzuki for a few years. So I have had my mandolin about 3 weeks and I have been studying and working so hard when one of them comes over and asks if he can try it. I know nothing about music and had no idea the violin and mandolin were alike at all so I am trying to show him what little I know and he starts plinking out all of the classical tunes and stuff he has learned which was cool. Then I realized a little kid who had never picked one up before knew way more than me which was a little sad. at least I have somebody around who can tune it for me

[Steve-o]

1) David Grisman (the gasoline)
2) Don Julin (the match)

Another former guitar player gone dormant until I discovered the mandolin.

[Chris Willingham]

Like many pickers my age (I'm 26), it was Chris Thile. Played music since I was 7 and mainly listened to rock. After seeing Nickel Creek the first time, I bought a cheapo Johnson, which was replaced by my eastman three months later, and quickly found my way to Bluegrass album band, J.D. Crowe and the New South, etc. Haven't really listened to anything but bluegrass in two and a half years. The music really infects you. As does the mandolin, MAS and the beauty of tuning in fifths. Having more fun playing music right now than I ever have in my life! :mandosmiley:

[hdismal]

Hello,
First heard Vassar Clements way back in the stone ages, with Bill Keith on "Something Old, Something Newgrass" and "The Bluegrass Sessions". Bought a fiddle. No Frets? What a gyp! Hey,..mandolin is tuned the same AND HAS frets. Bought one'a them too. Would learn the tune on the mando and then work with it on the fiddle.
Tried for years to play in any way shape or form like Vassar, and all I did was give myself years of headaches (no matter what kind of mute I tried). Just couldn't stand that whine so close to my ear. Finally put down the fiddle and kept the mandolin(s).
Mr Clements is still my guiding star for taste and timing, just have to put a whole lot of torque on it to play it with a flatpick. (Not that I can sound anything like him mind you, but he is the ideal I hear in my head.) Fare well, db

[journeybear]

For me it was pure random happenstance - my mother gave me one. She's an artist - sculpts human figures in wood - and she sensed a love of music in me. When I was 13 she gave me a guitar, a $20 Sears special. I couldn't make sense of it - six strings, four fingers, plus that one irregular interval - and despite some oddly illuminating lessons from the surfer kid up the road, I struggled mightily with it, while the neck slowly but surely warped. When the strings got to be an inch off the neck at the join, I ripped the strings off it, strangled it, and tossed it into the attic. :mad: By this time my folks had gotten divorced and my mom had gotten a job at the Bridgeport Goodwill, Personnel Director. One day an old Gibson A pumpkin in OHSC came off a truck. My mom snagged it for $75 and gave it to me. This immediately made sense to me - four courses for my four fingers, regular intervals, and the blessed thing sounded so purty without me having to do much, it kept me interested until I could figure it out. :mandosmiley:

"Figuring it out" was a little tricky, as back then, forty odd years ago in New England, no one knew much about mandolins. I found very little in my dad's Oxford Companion To Music - one paragraph stating it was an unimportant instrument (in terms of classical composition) similar to violin. The key piece of information there being now I knew how to tune it! I soon found a couple of Mel Bay books - How To Play The Mandolin (very rudimentary; not much help) and Mandolin Chords (VERY helpful) - and picked up some songbooks of songs I already knew - The Band, Jethro Tull, Traffic, Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, etc (did I not mention this was the late 60s?). By correlating the information in these two sources, I was able to sort out melody, chords, song structures, and the rest is music history. :mandosmiley:

Now, I was still working in a vacuum as far as hearing a mandolin on record goes. Not growing up in a bluegrass environment, you know. The first time I heard one was either in "Rag Mama Rag" by The Band," "Love In Vain" by The Rolling Stones (Ry Cooder), or "Ridin' Thumb" by Seals And Crofts. There's of course "Friend Of The Devil" and "Ripple" by Grateful Dead, someone named Grisman helping out, and eventually "Maggie May" by Rod Stewart (Ray Parker), but I think the biggest impact a mandolin recording had on me was "Goin' To Brownsville" from Ry Cooder's first album. Just a powerhouse minimalist workout, just mandolin and bass drum stomp. Until then I had no idea one could do so much with so little. Here's a live version from about that time - not quite as compelling but still pretty durn good.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSpKLgwcXD8 Ry Cooder - Goin' To Brownsville


Back in 1972(?), I saw Ry Cooder play at a club in Roslyn, N.Y. called 'My Father's Place'. Shortly after I ran to Mandolin Brothers and bought a 1916 Gibson Model "A".

In fact, after thirty years with an F-12, which got stolen two years ago, :crying: I'm coming full circle to a 1917 A pumpkin, much like my first one.


My Father's Place... what a GREAT club that was! ... Wrote my first music review for Good Times magazine after seeing Aztec Two-Step play there.

Gawd - ATS ... I can't believe I once asked if I could sit in at a gig, and they let me! They threw me into "Dean Moriarty," and I survived somehow. Didn't really help out much, though ... :redface:


I pretty much grew up there. Kitchen next to the stage - wild. Saw Aztec there as well, plus Jorma, Bromberg, Tracy Nelson, Larry Coryell, and dozens of others. A wonderful place run by "Eppy". I was sorry to see it close.

And I have a recording of that Cooder concert from there.

And they used to have Sunday afternoon 'folk' concerts. Had the privilege to drink with Van Ronk, laugh with Bert Jansch, and just love it.

I swear, reading stuff like this makes me miss the Northeast so much. When I asked Debbie Davies why she would leave sunny California for dreary Bridgeport, she said a combination of population density and hipper audience - but mostly the first. More people closer together means more clubs with shorter drives in between. Rather obvious, and obviously true. So more musicians come through, and listeners have more to choose from. I really miss that ...

[catmandu2]

delete

[catmandu2]

...old Gibson A pumpkin in OHSC came off a truck. My mom snagged it for $75 and gave it to me...

Had the priviledge to drink with Van Ronk, laugh with Bert Jansch, and just love it.
...I swear, reading stuff like this makes me miss the Northeast so much.

Love those moms.

(btw...they do have booze outside of the Northeast..;))

[journeybear]

Love those moms.

(btw...they do have booze outside of the Northeast..;))

I meant the music, you funny guy!!! :))

And the musicians ...

I met DVR a few times. I made the mistake of joking around a bit once and crossing a line - addressed him as "Mr. Ronk." Oh, did I get a tongue-lashing! Deserved it, too ... :redface:

[stratman62]

Started playing guitar at 20, a long long time ago. Bought my first mandolin at 22, all those guitar
players, played in lots of jams, gigs and binges. Picked the fiddle up, gave it away, it came back.
Finally at age 42 got mad and said You or Me fiddle. I think I won. Got a couple of new to me, mandolins
last year and have been burning them up. Still play guitar, fiddle, lap steel or whatever as the opportunity arrives, but put me in a blues jam with a mandolin in my hands, and I'm one happy
camper.

[Mike Scott]

I would have to say "insanity". That pretty much sums it all up!

[Leigh Coates]

Me too: David Grisman.

[Mike Bunting]

Bill Monroe.

[Andrew DeMarco]

I knew I wanted to play the mandolin after hearing "House of Tom Bombadil" off of one of Nickel Creek's albums. And hey, ho, here I am. I was a senior in high school. Now I'm about to graduate grad school.

[Dragonflyeye]

Maggie May, the Darlin's (Dillards) and Peter Ostroushko. That, and when I went into the music store to buy a guitar, mandolins sounded a whole lot more interesting!

[Alex Orr]

Played guitar for four or five years, mostly bluegrass/country and some fingerstyle blues. About two and a half years ago, I decided to get a mandolin to mess around with since everyone else I knew also played guitar. Found out the mando just seemed to work better. Prett soon the guitar was gathering dust. These days I still learn new tunes on the guitar every now and then, I just love the sound and feel of playing guitar way too much to ever stop playing it entirely, but the mando is the thing I practice on a nearly daily basis and when I got to jams, it's rare that I even think about bringing along my Martin.

[Elliot Luber]

I've told this on the cafe before, but I played both violin and guitar, and told this to a business acquaintance at the NAMM show. He was Don Stiernberg's brother. He explained how mandolin was the perfect hybrid between guitar right hand and and violin left. Took 20 years to sink in, but one day, frustrated by the uneven tuning of the guitar, I Googled mandolin and found the cafe. Bought an Eastman sight-unseen from Dennis at the Mandolin Store, and was mindblown that I could play a lot of classical violin music right out of the box! That was about four years ago, and playing has been a delightful obsession every since.

[Dan Johnson]

Sam Bush...

[John Flynn]

I had played guitar for 20+ years, mostly as a hobby, although I did do some "semi-pro" gigging in a rock band, during my mis-spent youth. Many years later, the church music group I was in wound up with four six-string guitar players, which was boring and redundant. I had always admired the mandolin from afar and bought a cheapo A and Jack Tottle's "Bluegrass Mandolin" book/record on impulse when I was in my local music store. I was immediately hooked. Within a year it was my main instrument and I got my first taste of MAS and traded up. Over the intervening 16 years I have occasionally gotten paid for playing the mandolin, but I actually prefer volunteer and charity gigs, jamming with friends and just playing on my own.

[Don Stiernberg]

This is a fun thread.

My brother(five years older than I)came up right in the thick of the "folk boom"--played guitar, then banjo. When he went to college one of his professors gave him a mandolin, since he liked that "picky stuff"...It went unplayed until I appropriated it and made an effort to get in on the fun of playing songs around the house.

My mother was the folk fan, had all the records. Pop had the jazz stuff. One day I heard a track
on the radio that brought it all together--Homer and Jethro playing "It's Allright With Me" from Playing it Straight. Right around that same time Mom heard an ad on the radio:"study mandolin with Jethro Burns". I was sent for lessons and decided after lesson one what I wanted to do. I'm still trying...several decades later. I had already begun purchasing every "album"(vinyl LP, a big round scratchy thing with notes in the grooves..) that had anything to do with the mandolin on the cover. This included Mr. Bluegrass by Bill Monroe and the famous green first album on Starday by The Newgrass Revival.Right from the start I was a goner for jazz, bluegrass, and newgrass on the mandolin. In fact, when Jethro asked what he should show me I asked him to teach me to play like Sam Bush. Imagine that! He said "What's a Sam Bush?"...joking of course. Their friendship began very shortly thereafter.

Thanks for starting and contributing to this thread, and while I'm at it, thanks to all the people I mentioned in this post.

[Gene Cannon]

Started me: Alan Bibey, in concert with Blueridge at Randy Wood Guitars in Bloomingdale,GA
Motivated me: My wife, who, after offering to buy me a Rogue, bought me a Washburn Jethro Burns instead, and later a Collings MT
Inspired me: Alan Bibey, Roland White, Butch Baldassari, John Reischman, Emory Lester, and Don Stiernberg...all at Kaufmann Kamp.

[CES]

Played sax (tenor and alto, could never actually save enough to get a decent soprano) officially in Jr High Band, unofficially through my Jr year of college (high school band director wanted me to do a fast uniform switch at halftime of football games and divide practice time, and wouldn't let me do Jazz and concert bands without marching, so that was that)...

Life changes put my playing music on a personal back burner (not in a bad way, just had some priority shifts) until I was 26 or 27, and I decided I had to do something other than work or I was gonna go nuts...as going to the gym for 2 hours a day was not conducive to family/marital bliss, I decided I'd sell my old sax and get a banjo...thinking back, I can't remember exactly why I chose banjo, but I was starting to get into BG and OT a little, Earl Scruggs a lot, and the O' Brother soundtrack totally hooked me...

While saving for the banjo, which didn't actually happen for about another year and a half, I borrowed a guitar from my father-in-law...think my wife was hoping I'd forget about the banjo :grin:...didn't happen. Details remain fuzzy, but around the same time a local radio station started using Ode to a Butterfly as an intro to their morning show, which led me to Nickel Creek, which, of course, led me to Chris Thile.

Resisted the mando for a couple more years, and still play guitar and occasionally banjo, but finally broke down...I remain hooked, and my wife's now resorting to dirty tricks, like, "Hey, you could sell the banjo and get a new mandolin!"
"Don't tell me my business, devil woman!" I jokingly reply, but she may be onto something there...problem is it's an entry banjo, and I want a nice mando!

Man, that's a long answer for a simple question...sorry!
:mandosmiley:

[abuteague]

As a college student, I got tired of being asked what I was going to do with my summer. I started sarcastically replying "I'm going to play a high pitched instrument near a large body of water."
Well, one person said, "how about mandolin?"
I said, "I don't know. I suppose."
She went to her dorm room and pulled out a mandolin and said it was mine if I wanted it. Free.
I was incredulous.
She said her music teacher died and left instruments to his previous students and she isn't a mandolin player. She would feel guilty selling it. She wanted to give it to someone who would play it.
It was a two point Ibanez. No truss rod.

[David Cottingham]

One word: Ripple

[Laird]

When folks I work with would get together for potlucks, we always ended up playing some music--five or six of us on acoustic guitar, singing John Prine or Dylan or Bob Marley. You know the scene. One night someone brought a mando that she didn't know how to play and I picked it up. Spent most of the evening figuring out the tuning and a few two-finger chords. She let me borrow it after that (since I'd taken it further in those few hours than she ever had), and I held onto it for a bout six months, till she had the nerve to ask for it back. That was about three years ago.

I bought a second-hand Kentucky (which sounded nice enough to me), but at some point I ordered a strap online from Janet Davis (trying to avoid shoulder pain), and that got me on their catalog mailing list. That was the beginning of the end. I'd drool over the high-end mandos in there, and finally decided to get a mid-range second-hand if I could. Got a nice two-year-old Eastman 515 last November, and playing an instrument with such beautiful sound has led me to practice more and more. I'm hooked--been playing an hour a day since then. Now if only I could get rid of this shoulder pain!

Oh, and you folks haven't helped matters any.

By the way, swayed by the pick discussions on this site, I finally sprung for a Blue Chip. After about two weeks, I ended up back with the Golden Gates that I'd drilled holes in (also on advice from this site). Maybe I'll go back to the Blue Chip, but the GG's feel much crisper.

[bones12]

Being around and hearing Dave Edmundson of the Hot Mud Family play his lovely oval hole in 1970 sent shivers up my spine that have never left. Old time music has been a daily driver for me since those college years ago while in Ohio . Carbolic Rag up close can cure almost anything. Can anything ever beat live music played with friends?. Doug in Vermont

[lucho]

I started on flutes, andean woodwinds, panpipes and the like... when I moved to study Grad school to the States I was learning charango... and looking at any other small travel instrument that could fit inside the suitcase...... When at school there, I started to play for church service in a newman center choir and also in a weekly irish session... so I found difficulties to play with the charango as well as wear looks from the crowd so I went for the next step... I wanted something small enough to play and sing....so I went to the nearest music shop in Kent (Ohio) called Woodsy's and tried a few mandolins, a dulcimer, and even gosh, a banjolin.... I ended buying a Kentucky A f hole mandolin, a few months later in the same shop I got a Vega tenor banjo, a mandola and a Cumbus... I was already a mandoaddict... suferring MAS
.... and now 20 years later I keep adding/trading mandolike string axes...

[Plectrosaurus]

Three guitars, one banjo, one washtub bass;problems with the guitars staying together;the banjo player suggested I get a mandolin and learn to chop chords. I did, and started learning fiddle tunes. That was 33 years ago. The banjo player was military and shipped out to Korea. Haven't heard from him since. His name is Bruce Starkweather from Sylacauga, Alabama. Would sure love to talk to him if any one out there knows him and how I can get up with him.

[jefflester]

August of 1998. I saw Nickel Creek perform and was blown away by the kid on mandolin and the Garcia/Grisman jazz collaboration "So What" was released.

I had enjoyed the previous Garcia/Grisman releases, but So What just grabbed me much more. Guitar player since 1978, Deadhead since 1982.

[mandolirius]

Doyle Lawson's solo to "Walk Don't Run" from Mike Auldridge's album "Blues & Bluegrass". Seriously. I didn't know anythng about bluegrass or the mandolin. The album had a cut that featured Mike, Lowell George on electric slide and David Bromberg on acoustic slide, which was getting airplay on the local rock fm station. I ordered the album because I was a fan of slide guitar and was learing to play a bit of that. But I heard that mandolin break and I knew right away that's what I wanted to do. I didn't even know what instrument I was listening to - I had to look on the back of the record and eliminate everything I knew the sound of. The only thing left was mandolin. I had some vague kind of "venetian gondola" idea of what a mandolin was, like a bowlback.

[journeybear]

... I didn't even know what instrument I was listening to - I had to look on the back of the record and eliminate everything I knew the sound of. The only thing left was mandolin. I had some vague kind of "venetian gondola" idea of what a mandolin was, like a bowlback.

I had a somewhat similar experience, before I had any notion of playing music. When I was a kid I got as a gift an album by Theodore Bikel and Geula Gill - Sing Folksongs From Just About Everywhere - Elektra EK161, 1958. They used instruments from around the world too, an ethnomusicological travelogue. In the Greek classic "Yerakina" there was a bouzouki, in songs from South America a charango, etc. These double-strung intruments rang in my head and stayed there subconsciously until years later I heard "Santa Lucia" in some movie, played on a bowlback in a gondola in Venice, and it reawakened those memories. I dug out that record - by this time I understood what was going on there better - and it helped open my mind to music from other cultures. As well as variations in instrumentation and time signatures and arrangements and dynamics and ... well, you know! :grin: :mandosmiley: :whistling:

[Youda]

Wow! Such interesting stories on this thread!

I started playing piano as a little girl. Although music wasn't my major, I spent a lot of time hanging around the music department in college so I could use their pianos when no one else was using them for practice time. I also had a work-study job in the music department cataloging all the LP records (no CDs way back then). To make the time go faster, I listened to the kind of music I was indexing that day. Lots of early baroque with lute and harpsicord. There was something about the sound that I just loved. It's hard to explain, but I just loved the sound of it. As I went through the different musical periods of classical music, I'd listen for the mandolin from all the composers who wrote music for the instrument. Then, finally, listening wasn't enough. I wanted to do it! I started out with bowlbacks. I plinked away on them for many years, learning to play a few tunes, but not a real concentrated effort to learn. One day I realized that I was getting older and knew that if I wanted to ever play the mandolin, I'd better get going. About then I saw an old Gibson A hanging on the wall of a music store...and the beat goes on. I see it as something I do for myself, hearing those sounds that only can come from a mandolin, just brings joy to my life. My only regret is that I didn't get serious about it sooner.

[mandocrucian]

Dave Swarbrick with nods to Dave Pegg, Richard Thompson, Ry Cooder and Martin Jenkins.

http://www.derbydeadpool.co.uk/images/celebs/s/swarbd.jpg

I really would have prefered to have played Swarb-style fiddle, but the squawking on one when I tried was so horrendous that I opted to go with the mandolin instead as an interim step to future fiddling (and/or to go guitar.) Toss up between wanting to play fiddle like Swarbrick (still among the top-5 favorite fiddlers) and guitar like Richard Thompson and John Renbourn.

NH

[Barb Friedland]

One word: Ripple

Ripple as in the song or the beverage? ;)

[Jeff Richards]

I was riding in the car with my younger brother. We were talking about life in general and musdic came up. I talked about the few classes of guitar and piano I had taken in college. He was surprised and asked what instrument I would want to play if I ever had an opportunity. Would I continue the piano or guitar? I had been listening to a lot of diverse music, and for some reason, the mandolins that I heard intrigued me the most, so I said "the mandolin."

A few weeks later it was my birhtday. My brother and I were sharing an apartment at the time and he came home all excited to show me what he had gotten me as a gift. It was a Flatiron pancake.

Definitely a cool brother.

[man dough nollij]

Ripple as in the song or the beverage? ;)

MD 20/20.

http://eehard.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/maddog.jpg

[allenhopkins]

Got interested in bluegrass in college, played banjo (badly). After discharge from the Army, wanted to start a band with my brother John and my friend Bob, who played banjo (well). Found two mandolins in my grandfather's attic (Gibson A-1, B&J Victoria bowl-back), decided I was the mandolin player in the band. Played badly but enthusiastically. Thirty-nine years later, play less badly, still enthusiastically.

[Andrew Roberts]

When I was a freshman in high school my older brother came home from college with the first major Nickel Creek album. I distinctly remember listening to the sound of Chris Thile playing some sweet rhythm mandolin on The Fox and fell in love with the mandolin. I picked up a guitar instead and played that for about 5 years, but never got very good. I didn't start playing the mandolin, however, until about 8 years later (i.e. last September). I was walking around Nashville shortly after moving here and saw a guy outside of a pizza place with a mandolin case. I though to myself, if there is ever a time and a place to pick up the mandolin it is here in Nashville. About a week later I went to Gruhn's and picked up my first mandolin, and I have been loving it every day since then...

[Mike Crater]

I'd never played a stringed instrument, but fancy myself as being a singer. I headed out to the local guitar shop to buy a ukulele, just to mess around a bit. There were the mandolins, hanging on the wall in all their sexy splendor. The mandolins spoke to me, and I was smitten. Four years and five mandolins later, we're still in love.

[Spencer]

Hearing a tape of my fiddle playing.

[Stephen Lind]

played guitar for 50+ years and always wanted a small one that i could love but
never did find one that was quite right

about a year ago one of my students gave me a mandolin and i discovered that it wasn't really a small guitar i'd been looking for

it was the mandolin:mandosmiley:

[Jill McAuley]

I got my first electric guitar when I was 11 years old and my misspent youth and adulthood were spent playing in punk bands, both in Ireland, and then the States when I moved there in '95. Then in 2002 I spent 8 months back home fixing up an old farmhouse in East Galway and one evening a programme came on the telly about traditional music and regional fiddling styles - I got the notion to maybe try learning the fiddle, and when I returned to the States I found a decent cheap one on craigslist. Took some lessons, got ok on it, but it didn't really grab hold of my interest the way guitar had when I'd started playing it way back when. Then in 2006 I moved back to my farmhouse in Ireland and upon learning that the tenor banjo was tuned the same as fiddle I thought it might be a good way to learn more tunes for the fiddle. I ordered an entry level tenor banjo online and while waiting for it to arrive I happened to be in a music shop in Dublin and a friend I was with pointed at a mandolin and said "Hey, try playing that..." so I sat down with it and picked out one of the tunes I knew on fiddle. Couldn't stop thinking about how fun it was to play that mandolin the rest of the day, so when I got back home I started researching them online, found the cafe, and also the mandolin.org site and via both of those read all kinds of good stuff about The Acoustic Music Co. and discovered it was located in Brighton, where a good pal of mine lived and who I was long overdue to visit. A rather hasty visit was planned and I ended up returning with a Jimmy Moon flat top mandolin. I was completely obsessed with trad music and dividing my time between the banjo and mandolin (and completely neglecting the guitar) but then the mandolin started to get neglected because I upgraded my banjo to a 1920 Stromberg open back and started taking tenor banjo lessons with Angelina Carberry, one of the best banjo players in Ireland in my opinion, and all of my focus was going there.

I returned to the States last May (the Jimmy Moon mandolin and my guitars having been sold to help fund the trip) and quickly discovered that apartment living and banjo playing were not exactly a love match (at least not as far as my neighbors were concerned!) I was in a local music shop one afternoon and saw a little cheap old Harmony mandolin on the wall - at the time I thought it would be a cool birthday present for a friend of mine who's birthday was about a month away. So for that whole month I was plucking away on that mandolin and there was no turning back. I ended up giving it to my pal a month late as a belated present because I couldn't bear to be mando-less while saving for one of my own. It's totally taken over as my main instrument now - I play every single day for at least an hour or two and more at weekends. And of course the MAS affliction wasn't far behind: I have a Weber Aspen II, a Redline Traveler on the way in a few weeks, and a Pomeroy A-4 will be arriving in June (did have to do the old catch and release with an '85 Flatiron 2M though, which I'm still having a wee twinge of regret about...) I still love the tenor banjo, but as you good folks all know, there is just something so addictive about the mandolin!

Cheers,
Jill

[groveland]

Fifths tuning.

[johnparrott]

1965, maybe? Rob Winston, talented friend of mine in Plandome, NY, built a mandolin out of oak. It didn't sound too bad, and it was durable. Neither of us could play it, but we tried pretty hard. Then we heard "Temptation Rag" as played by Artie Rose on the "Ragtime Jug Stompers" record, and we knew what to shoot for.

Off to college in Wisconsin a few years later, where I played with John Stiernberg. His brother Don would visit and play mandolin, bass, guitar, fiddle, and dulcimer (!) with us. He was good right out of the gate, folks, and he didn't sound like anybody but himself. Thanks to him, I got interested in trying to write mandolin tunes, something I've had fun with ever since.

I have been lucky in the "Friend" department...

[Mike Crocker]

The first time, in my teens (maybe 1974), was because a friend had one and I was intrigued. It didn't last more than a couple of months because I approached it like a guitar if I remember.

The second time was in my thirties when I thought celtic mandolin was cool, played in a celtic style group, had lots of performance and recording opportunities, and needed something else to play (as if keys, guitar, bass, banjo, ukulele, autoharp, melodion weren't enough, LOL).

Since then I've kept at it. Still play some celtic, hymns, classical on it. If the world wasn't so guitar-centric I'd get more mandolin.

Peace, Mooh.

[Rob Brown]

Being a non-playing individual, I had threatened on many occasions to learn the banjo. That was after begrudgingly going to see the Lee Mace Ozark Opry as a youngster on family vacation. Then Mick Jager and "Hey You Get off of My Cloud" really started to sound undesireable.
Three years ago I told the story to a friend and he went into another room in his apartment and brought out an old Harmony in mint condition. I still have it, along with a few more (mas).
The rest is history.

[JeffD]

A friend of mine in high school handed me a bowlback and told me how to hold it and where to put my fingers and how it was tuned.

I learned the notes by tuning my Dad's banjo like a mandolin, and getting out my beginner clarinet music books I hadn't looked at since fifth grade. Once I could read I pursued every scrap of sheet music I could find. Didn't matter what music it was, I tried everything.

My ear training was to put on my parents LPs, with about $1.50 worth of quarters to slow them down. I would drop them exactly a fifth in tone, and then try and play the music down a string. Once I had the fingerings, I would move up a string and plunk away. I played things like "Never on Sunday" from the movie sound track, "El Solo Toro" from Herb Alfred and the Tijuana Brass, the hit from the Prime of Miss Jean Brody sound track, anything I could find.

I was playing like that for several years before I ever met anyone who also played mandolin, or ever heard a mandolin on a record. Never heard of bluegrass or Bill Monroe, or anything till much later.

[KyleBerry]

I just started playing less than a week ago. I have liked bluegrass music for a long time. I never really could play any musical instruments. I started playing piano about 6 months ago, and I love it. It came so natural to me, and I taught myself. I was really infleunced by a someone from my church, who is also a member on here. I tried to play guitar for a little, but that didn't work. But when I picked up a mandolin I had an amazing feeling. The guitar felt akward, but the mandolin felt natural.

[journeybear]

... My ear training was to put on my parents LPs, with about $1.50 worth of quarters to slow them down. I would drop them exactly a fifth in tone, and then try and play the music down a string. Once I had the fingerings, I would move up a string and plunk away. I played things like "Never on Sunday" from the movie sound track ...

I was playing like that for several years before I ever met anyone who also played mandolin, or ever heard a mandolin on a record. Never heard of bluegrass or Bill Monroe, or anything till much later.

This explains so much! (Not!) But I do recall on the taboo thread you mentioned you came to bluegrass later in your mandovelopment, and now I see how. Me, I started by applying the instrument I could play to the music I liked (rock and blues), and discovered bluegrass much later. But I like your analytical approach, and the precise slowing down of records is just brilliant! :grin:

Never forget "Never on Sunday!" That and "Santa Lucia" and other "schmaltzy" selections are great attention-getting devices while bandmates are tuning or deciding what to play next or otherwise stalling. There are great double-stopportunities on the chorus ... :mandosmiley:

[drewgrass]

i got a cheap fender mando from my grandparents for christmas 4 years ago. i was playing guitar in a country band. it was getting less country all the time with mesa boogies and what not. my grandparents always had bluegrass records when i was growing up. for the first year i did not play it much. i took it on a trip to the lake and had a campfire jam with guitars and i was hooked. quit the band the next day . mas kicked in and ive been buying selling trading to get better ones every since. its been one of the best decision ive ever made. for some reason playing bluegrass and gospel tunes have helped me straighten up my life. this music can heal people

[Keith Wallen]

Mine is simple... Sam Bush!

[Sean Greer]

One reason: the tone of the instrument. I had been working on learning guitar, but wasn't all that into it. Then a friend brought over a mandolin that someone had loaned to him. I sat in a chair and played chords on it and thought "Man, this is so much easier than guitar AND I like the tone better!" A couple months later, after doing some research on the Cafe, I bought a Weber special edition oval from The Mandolin Store. Can't wait to get home and do some picking!

[Bob Andress]

Like many others here it was Grisman. A bit of Dead Head who was given a copy of Not For Kids Only. And I aint been right since. Thanks Jerry and Dawg!

[Tracy Ballinger]

A friend of mine was learning to play banjo and wanted someone to play with, so I chose the mandolin after really noticing its use on some tracks I was singing with at church. Fast forward 3 years: I'm still playing, and he's not! lol

[jnation]

I was jamming with some new friends, five of us "struming" on guitars and someone trying to sing lead. I told them "we need a lead iinstrument! I had my Brother's old 1948 Gibson A style at home so I came back the next week jam session with the mando and played my first song, "Red River Valley" and just kept on going and have been playing six years now and love every minute of it, practiceing, playing in groups and jams. I never picked up the guitar again. I play old country and Gospel. Other instruments I play are keyboard, dobro, fiddle and starting banjo now. Joe

[Dan Adams]

A freind and I saw Jethro Tull in concert in high school and the warm-up band was Steeleye Span. We later saw Steeleye Span as the headliner at a small club, 'Ebbets Field' in Denver. The use of mandolin in traditional Celtic music was my first introduction to the instrument. Not too long after that my friend hands me his father's old Sears Silvertone mandolin and ask me to learn how to play it so we can begin to play folf and bluegrass music. Hanging at the Denver Foldklore Center in the 70's, the Colorado Rocky Mountain Bluegrass Festival, predecessor to Rocky Grass, they all came into my life about the same time, so it was a collection of circumstances that sent me in the direction of learning to play the mandolin. The journey continues.. Dan

[Bruce Evans]

"What made you start playing mandolin?"

A woman.

She was the first woman I met after leaving my first wife. She played fiddle. She was tall and slim and "talented", even though she didn't play fiddle all that well. ;) Ostensibly, she was going to teach me to play fiddle. I quickly found out that for me, sticking an instrument under my chin and playing it is about as comfortable as sticking it someplace else and trying to play it. So as an attempt to salvage some of my self respect I got a mandolin.

But this new woman was every bit as crazy as my ex. She was gone. The fiddle is now viewed as an instrument of physical torture. It's gone. The mandolin is still around. I have also been incredibly fortunate to find my best friend in the world and we have been married 8 years. She plays a hammered dulcimer, and I can't play that either.

[Randi Gormley]

Grew up preferring classical music (as opposed to the jazz and big band stuff my parents liked and the rock n roll my brother was into) and drifted into folk music when I was in college in the 70s. I've always enjoyed medieval things (probably as a result of all the sword-and-sorcery stuff I read), so joined the Society for Creative Anachronism and taught myself the recorder to play the cool medieval music. (Way back then, it wasn't taught in school -- I'm a reformed flute and drum player from school band -- but with the help of Mel Bay, I managed to do all right.) There's something so medieval about lutes, though, that always intrigued me, so when I was at my hometown music store cruising through the recorder consort music I noticed this lute-like instrument hanging on the wall. It was a bowlback mandolin. When my parents asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I jokingly said I wanted the mandolin I'd just seen. To my astonishment, there it was when I got up that morning. Guilt is a powerful incentive, so I went back to the music store and bought a Mel Bay learn the mandolin book and taught myself how to play the instrument. It was my second instrument for years after the recorder. When I was in my 20s, I moved to southern Ohio for a job and took up with the young gentleman who's been my husband for 26 years -- and he played guitar. There's not a whole lot of music for recorder and guitar, but there was a very nice fiddle and guitar book I found that concentrated on folk music from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and we began playing duets. The recorders dropped by the wayside and we're still playing mandolin and guitar duets, almost exclusively Irish and other Celtic music. We joined an Irish community band about six years ago and now the mando is about all I play any more and enjoying it more and more.

[lovethemf5s]

I went to a New Lost City Ramblers concert in the 60s and saw Mike Seeger play a couple of F style Gibsons. I thought they looked cool and sounded even cooler.

[Rhinestone]

After around 35 years as a pro pedal steel player around SoCal,someone in my band (Riders of the Purple Sage) gave me a Martin A on the condition that I actually learn to play it. I bought a chord book and started attempting to play all the stuff that was already bangin around my head. That was only about 6 years ago and I'm still at it. I found that as soon as I got a bit of chord and scale instincts under my fingers I could get around on it pretty well within a few months. I'd spent time on the road with Sam Bush in the 80s w/Leon Russell's band and knew what a mandolin was capable of so there was really no mystery to the whole endeavor - just fun. Years of playing Dick Dale style surf guitar in the early/mid 60s meant mando tremolo picking was already in my tool box. Compared to pedal steel with it's constantly morphing re-entrant chromatic tunings,I'm drawn to the symmetry,range and distilled succinctness of the short scale fifths tuning and how you can get to things right quick. Then when I got an earful of Evan Marshall who lives around here,I thought: well hell - there's even more going on on this thing than I thought! Evan replaced me when I left the Riders in 2006 BTW. Mando is very portable,easy to practice a lot and I take it everywhere I go. I think I'm gonna go practice right now....

[Bertram Henze]

...The fiddle is now viewed as an instrument of physical torture. It's gone.

I know EXACTLY what you mean... :cool:

Bertram

[SternART]

1) David Grisman (the gasoline)
2) Don Julin (the match)


Not the first time Dawg was the gasoline.....back in the early DGQ days.....They used to call David Grisman and Tony Rice the Gasoline Bros.

[JeffD]

"What made you start playing mandolin?"

A woman.

.


That's what made me start drinking mint julep. Ahh, but thats a different thread. ~o)

[mandozilla]

I had been playing guitar in BG bands for just over 10 years and then a lull in the action kicked in. I got bored with the guitar and decided to use this 'lull' to take up the mandolin which I'd been meaning to do for a real long time. After being bandless for several years I got the opportunity to play mandolin in a BG band and jumped on it. Played with that band for about 8 years then we scattered to the 4 winds.

Stopped picking altogether about a year after that and only began pickintg again 16 years later (AAARGH!) in late 2007. I always admired mandolin picking and pickers since I started picking BG music. I first saw Bill Monroe live in 1973 and was awestruck by the power with which he played and I knew someday I'd pick it up.

What made me start playing again (currently) was after years of not playing or listening to BG music, my wife bought me a Martin D35 for my b'day a couple years ago. I slowly gravitated to flatpicking but it kind of left me "flat". So, one year ago I bought a used, quality, luthier made mandolin and I've been in BG mando heaven ever since...I'm a picking fool trying to make up for all that lost time. Got re-aquainted with many of my old picking friends and have made dozens of new ones...I'm a happy BG camper and I'm nuts about the mandolin. :grin:

~o):popcorn:

[Dan Hoover]

my aunt,(who's italian,i'm not) had one hanging on her wall,would never let me play with,then years later i saw David Grisman on tv....the addiction started...

[AlanN]

Seeing Frank Wakefield jamming in the Saratoga taverns.

[farmerjones]

i started playing fiddle in June of '03. My instructor said, "You've got to get a mandolin too, because they're tuned the same." I said, "Ok." So i've been a student of both ever since. They seem to compliment each other.

[Patrick Market]

I grew up listening to country and bluegrass music. It was in the house all the time. My grandparents lived with us, and they had been evangelists, so my grandmother was always humming or singing one gospel tune or another. I played the trombone and the guitar, both of which my folks encouraged. Still, I was always intrigued by the mandolin. Not sure why I didn't do it sooner.

As I got older I got more into rock (surprise!), but I noticed that my ears perked up whenever that mandolin overtone or accent appeared in various songs: "Maggie May," "Going to California," "Losing My Religion" to name a well-known few.

Moving to Missouri made it hard to miss Rhonda Vincent, and Nickel Creek seemed to be everywhere.

"And the [mandolin] worms ate into his brain..."

So, I bought a beater, and have been learning ever since.

[Luno]

Look... Listen.... Learn this, the Mandolin is beautiful
And so am I... So thats why I started :Dyabba:D

[Andrew Ferguson]

Started with the guitar 25 years ago, and would still see this as my main/first instrument.

Mandolin came about cause I used to jam with a bunch of guys about 15 years ago. We all played the guitar and I thought we needed something else, a cheap PacRim mandolin was that something else.
Didn't really learn to play it though. Just a few 2 finger chords. Sold it after about a year.

About 2 years ago I picked up another mandolin and started to learn to play it. The mandolin is such an intuitive instrument, 5ths just make so much sense.

I spend more time practicing the mandolin now than I do playing the guitar. I wouldn't call myself a mandolinist yet, but thats the goal.

[Mandobart]

My friend and neighbor, Jerry. He and I get together fairly often to play guitar and drink homebrew. He had this old Fancisco A mandolin that needed re-stringing. All I knew was that mandos are tuned like fiddles, which I play. So I restrung it, set up the bridge and cleaned it off. I brought it back and picked out a few old fiddle tunes on it. He said "I can't play, why don't you hang on to it for a while." I guess that's how many addictions start, an encouraging friend.

[Mike Snyder]

A friend of mine in my old home town took up the guitar, and started playing at keg parties. I love to sing, so I was always singing along. I think he actually suggested that if I wanted to be part of the "band", I needed an instrument. The guitars in all the pawnshops were too expensive, so I bought a cheap pancake which lasted no time at all, then another cheapo bell shaped "big hips" mando I don't recall the name of. We played John Prine, Willie, Walon, Jerry Jeff, The Hag, old country, old rock&roll, and outlaw stuff. The chicks loved us, after they had a belly full of beer.

[Chris Keth]

3 things happened within a couple years of each other: 1. I became interested in my Irish and Scottish heritage and the music the went with it. 2. I started to think those old bluegrass records my Mom listened to when I was growing up were pretty cool. 3. I was given an old broken down bowlback mandolin (that is now in the hands of another, but it sparked the kindling).

[bernard morand]

The Cuckoo, Internet & Railroad Earth.
Some years ago I was searching for the origins of the legends about the cuckoo (you know, that pretty bird which can make you rich all the year long if you have some coins in your pocket when he sings for the first time). I discovered that both Rory Gallagher (whom I loved for a long time) and Janis Joplin (whom i loved lesser) had this tune in their repertoire. I already suspected that some common ancestor ought to exist. And I found a strange thing enjoyed by american people which they called Old Time Music of which I was totally unaware. Enjoyed Doc Watson and passed to the descendants called bluegrassmen. I made a node to the loop when I heard my Cuckoo tube played by Railroad Earth in response to a Google request. Strange feeling of something sounding incoherent at first sight but there was the stricking and alien solos of the Skehan's electric mandolin. As I was going to retire and had never time enough to make music before I decided that I would learn mandolin. Three years after I continue to go every week to my mandolin lesson and play everyday. Perhaps will manage to play The Cuckoo one of these days. Actually I am inclined to favour celtic music but isn't the cuckoo messenger coming from Ireland? Or may be from Romania?

[Phil Sussman]

Like a lot of other folks posting here, I came to the mandolin from the guitar. I've been playing guitar since around 1963. Over the years I've attempted to learn some fiddle tunes on the guitar without a lot of success. I had a cheap used mandolin for many years and I learned a few chords and scales on it, but it wasn't playable past the fifth fret. So when it fell apart a few months back, I got something I could learn on (Kentucky KM 150). I grew up with a small variety of folk music records at home, including a New Lost City Ramblers record and a Newport record with Flatt & Scruggs on it, and the Clancy Brothers (does that count as Celtic? :) ). So I heard some bluegrass and mandolin early on.

I've always been interested in all kinds of music, especially American folk and blues styles when I started out. In the late 60s and early 70s I saw a lot of great musicians, including Bill Monroe (once) and Andy Statman (several times), but in those days I never thought of trying to play a mandolin.

I'm an amateur guitar player, and over the years I worked at it on and off, and got better at it than I ever thought I would be when I started out. So that gives me the illusion that I can learn the mandolin :mandosmiley:

My interest is to learn some of the fiddle tunes and Celtic tunes that are bouncing around in my head and that I've listened to over the years. Midnight on the Water has stuck in my head since hearing it at a bluegrass festival in the mid 70s and I want to play it on something. I have a fair number of Celtic music CDs that I enjoy, such as Altan, and would like to learn to play some of that kind of music, but not as fast as Altan does ;).

I'm having a great time with the mandolin, and have picked up lots of interesting information and advice while lurking on this site. So I've recently joined. The resources on this site are amazing!

[Gutbucket]

The loads of money you can make playing this silly little instrument, and the way all the chicks rush the stage. Easy to get hooked.:grin:

[Charley wild]

I was a guitar and dobro/non-pedal steel player who came into a Gibson "A" mandolin in a trade. It sort of kicked around for a while and one day I was very inspired by John Duffy's great intro and solo on the song "These Men of God". I could play a few chords on the mandolin and that was about it. So I went to work trying work out that solo. From there I went to some Everett Lilly stuff and some of Bill's things, etc. I've always liked the older tremolo type stuff and still do. I have always liked playing behind a singer and a bit of soloing versus playing up down fiddle tune style. Good thing because nowdays with a medical problem that's all I CAN do!lol

[journeybear]

The loads of money you can make playing this silly little instrument, and the way all the chicks rush the stage. Easy to get hooked.:grin:


Where do you live? I'm moving THERE!!! :))

[Kirk Albrecht]

Hearing Bill Monroe on the radio. Blown away. My fiancee bought me an Epiphone MM-20 for a wedding present almost 26 years ago. Still have it and play it (nice Japan model, solid spruce top, solid mahogany back and sides, mahogany neck).

[Taylor and Tenor]

I feel in love with Traditional Irish music during my numerous trips to Ireland over the past 10 years and a year and half ago I began to play at local TIM sessions. I soon found out that my old Yamaha didn't fit in as too many guitars can spoil a session.

So I dug out to an old four stringed instrument I had in a closet for 30 years and began playing that. But the long neck and my small hands didn't work either. So I was encouraged to pick up a mandolin and begin learning some TIM tunes by one of the local well known session leaders.

A year and three mandolins (two Kentuckys and an Aria) later, I now attend and play at two, sometimes three local sessions a week. loving TIM even more. As I recently lead my first set with "Inisheer" and "Down in the Sally Gardens" - both slow aires.

"Never judge a mandolin by its top".

[Fiddler3]

I started playing 43 or 44 years ago. My Dad was a fiddle player(2nd in MO ST Contest 1961) and he needed a band. My sister learned the guitar and since my Dad played the fiddle he could show me some of the basic chords, etc. My brother was on his own with the banjo and then the dobro, but we played together many years, as a family band. Some of the greatest memories of my life. They pass quickly.

[Brandon Flynn]

Ode to a Buttery by Nickel Creek. Chris Thile's mandolin was the best sound I had ever heard, and then I tried my friends mandolin, bought my own, and mandolin quickly beat out guitar.

[David Hansen]

I found this:

http://img237.imagevenue.com/loc208/th_85594_Lyon_1_Healy_122_208lo.jpg (http://img237.imagevenue.com/img.phpimage=85594_Lyon_1_Healy_122_208lo.jpg)

in my grandmother's garage in 1967. It had no strings and was a little worse for wear but it was enough to get me started. No one in my family played the mandolin or could explain how it got into the garage but it became a great joy for me. In the sixties when everyone played acoustic guitar I was the weird guy with the mandolin. The mandolin ended up with a sunken top from being in another garage for many years but has since come back home. I didn't play much mandolin between 1972 and 1992 except to break out a Fender 4 string electric on St Paddy's Day but I have been playing mando things pretty consistently since then.

[Plectrosaurus]

Three novice guitar players and one good banjo player (Bruce Starkweather). Bruce suggested I buy a mandolin and learn to chop to help us stay together. Bought a 'Hondo' the rest is history. I play an Aria "A" model for years before I got my Eastman.~o) Love Bluegrass and the old fiddle tunes.

[Carolie]

I've always been fascinated by the sound of the instrument. When Led Zeppelin IV came out, I loved the songs with the mandolin on them. The only mandolin music I had heard before that was classical.

My husband and I gave my father-in-law a mandolin for Christmas a few years before he died and I loved listening to him play. He had my mother-in-law give me the mandolin back after he died. It's taken 2 years before I could even face trying to play music of any kind after his death, but I'm finally to that point.

I realized I needed something more in my life. Something fun. I've been too wrapped up in doing daily stuff that needs to be done. My physical therapist also recommended I find a way to relax.

I have the problem with my spinal cord injury, I'm pretty much in constant pain (nerve pain) which raises my stress levels. I read an article someplace that said playing music is one of the best ways to reduce and/or stop pain.

So I started learning. I've also taken the 5-string banjo I've carted around for 30 years out of the closet and have started learning to play it as well.

Carolyn

P.S.-What kills me now is that my husband and I picked up an old potato bug mandolin which was in pieces and kept it for years. A few years ago we realized we'd never be able to afford to have it restored and we threw it away. I wish I still had it. I'd find some way to get it restored. There was no manufacturer's name on it, so I don't think it would have been worth anything.

[Andrew Faltesek]

I had always wanted to play mandolin since I started on guitar back in the 70's...my first guitar was a cheap Pan 12-string and I really liked the ring of the doubles and octave strings.

As I was nearing my 50th birthday, one day while doing ranchwork with breaks of jamming on guitar and harmonica, my friend Songbutcher brought out a Fender starter mando kit which he knew would interest me and drive me nuts with long-repressed desire. I set it up for him as it was almost unplayable out of the box, and tried it out with no idea of chord shapes or anything. He said I should get one as it was cheap, and I responded that I would probably aquire my "second" mando first.

After deciding to get myself a mandolin for my 50th BD, I soon realized it would take twice the money I'd saved to get anything I could stay with for a while. My wonderful wife helped with some funds, and I lucked out when the Weber STE prototypes were available. I snapped one up and have been pleased with it ever since. Songbutcher suffered a bit of envy over my aquisition, but I let him play it any time we jam if he wants.

The other factor was that mando players are rare in my circle of friends...nobody I knew played one. It was nice to have something other than harmonica, guitar, or voice to add to the mix.

I would like to get a better one someday, but it would probably be an extravagance unless I get considerably better at playing it. I am very happy with the STE...I should never have waited so long to get one as they are just fantastic to play.

[300win]

My inspiration for playing mandolin, guitar, and banjo all came from my dad. One of my first memories as a child {around 5 years old} was watching him and listening to him play guitar and sing the old mountain ballads and the Monroe Brothers tunes, that is what got me wanting to be a musician. Also later on when I was 7 in 1962, I seen Flatt and Scruggs for the first time at a local school house in person, that was the thing that caused me to not be the same since that day.

[Hillsdale Leroy]

I am actually returning to the mandolin after a long time. When I was about 14 I learned to play so I could hang out with my cowboy chord, guitar strummin' dad. That lasted until my teenage "friends" talked into playing the cool stuff on guitar. Now at 43, I know what cool really is. Cool is what YOU love, not what others think you should love.

[Caleb]

I am actually returning to the mandolin after a long time. When I was about 14 I learned to play so I could hang out with my cowboy chord, guitar strummin' dad.
I somehow woke up one day and found myself as one of these dads. But I also play a bit of mandolin.

:mandosmiley:

[Carlier]

I was a guitarist who was asked to write children's songs for a play about a Turkish hero (Keloglan) and his donkey. I listened to Turkish music, and bought a second hand Turkish mandolin off someone in a flat in the middle of nowhere. I found the mandolin great for writing songs, especially for coming up with simple melodies which work well for young children. The play was a hit; we performed it around 80 times over a period of 2.5 years in the Netherlands. I was in my 20s at the time, and have recently picked up the mandolin again. I enjoy the ease with which you can come up with melodies on it-maybe because it's all tuned in 5ths.

[Rob Gerety]

I played guitar at a pretty basic level as a teenager and even through college - folk music mostly, a little three chord John Prine - that sort of thing. Then I raised a family for 25 years. Then I started getting back into playing guitar - in a much more committed way. I taught myself to play fingerstyle blues. I realized that I needed to get out and play with others and so I started to work with a fellow that teaches how to play contra dance band music (jazzed up celtic) with local amateur musicians. That experience really pushed me to improve. But, the chord players have a tough job - lots of improvisation for the chord players. In my struggle to learn to play good back up my instructor told me that you have to know the melodies to play good back up and suggested the mandolin as a easier instrument to learn melodies. So, I bought my first mando - an Eastman - and now I'm hopelessly addicted and thoughts of a higher end instrument are starting to creep into the back of my head and I'm trying to suppress them. All this has helped my guitar playing tremendously even though all I do is sit around and play mando every chance I get.

[Capt. E]

I have always been interested in instruments of all kinds and I had renewed my exploration of the guitar when I found a Gibson LG-3 cheep. Soon after while shopping for picks at a local music shop, I saw a used Flat Iron and was immediately taken interested in the look of it. It disappeared soon afterwards but then I saw a similar Mid-Missouri at a pawn shop. Got online and found the Cafe where I learned what it was and what it was worth: turned out to be a bargin, I bought it and immediately fell in love with it. Things evolved from there especially with the help of Fiddlers Green Music Shop when they moved here in 2008. Don't have the mid-mo any more, but have since been somewhat immersed in the whole MAS disease. By the way, I don't fool with the guitar anymore. My mandolins and my cajun accordion are all I really need.

[smokyt81]

Ira Louvin, Sam Bush, Ira Louvin, Bobby Osbourne, Ira Louvin, and Big Mon in that order. In case you haven't guessed, I like Ira Louvin's playing. Alot

[un5trung]

In my late 40s after an adulthood of graduate degrees and career building I found I needed to Find A Hobby. I listen to a lot of traditional and acoustic music, and played some guitar in high school and college. At some point I'd purchased an broken banjo with the intent of making it into a working instrument, but never got around to it. When I realized I'd have to find something to do for the month that I recovered from hip replacement I decided to buy the materials I'd need beforehand and build me a banjo.

And that's what I did. I found I liked playing banjo, and became as obsessed with it as I had with various graduate degrees. Guess I'm obsessive. I was thrilled. My wife -- not so much. Turns out The Molly -- love of my life -- isn't that fond of clawhammer banjo. At least clawhammer banjo played morning noon & night.

So I figured I blend in some quiet fingerstyle guitar, and dragged out my old ash-body dread. Turns out the same arthritis that destroyed my hip is busy destroying other joints, including the right shoulder. So I couldn't really play guitar: the dread was too wide for me to play comfortably.

A friend had a mandolin hanging on his wall. He didn't play it, but thought it looked cool. Eh. My opinion? Instruments are for playing, not hanging. So one day I took it. Hehe. Took a while but he's talking to me again. Anyway, cleaned it up, applied strings and gave it a go. I really like the mando. I'm playing it more than the banjo now. I'll never be very good -- took it up late in life and have stiff fingers -- but who cares? I've only myself to entertain; not looking for an audience. The Molly is happy, I'm happy, Mr. Wegen and Mr. Red Bear and Mr. D'Addario are all happy. Life is good.

[bmac]

A few years of piano lessons (classical) as a kid.

Then a year with a bar room pianist of Django ilk... Oh-Yeah!!!

Self-taught guitar during the folk stuff of the'70s. Dropped it for career focus...

Serious stroke in 1999 left me legally blind and some brain damage.

Took up mandolin because i had very little balance and figured if I tipped over the mandolin might survive but a guitar probably wouldn't. Got interested and really focused on mandolin playing and recently restoring defunct mandolins and mandolin banjos. My musical focus is on blues. It is kind of a passion. I play roughly four hours per day and restore instruments maybe another four. Last summer I did a local public radio show on the mandolin in blues... I intend to continue with another radio show with mandolin blues focus this spring.

Among my restored mandolins is a 1935 Stradolin and it became my blues mandolin as well as my favorite overall mando.

That's my story... and I'm stickin to it.

[CTH Man]

Our mandolin player had left the band...I was playing guitar ... we had another guitar player ( a good one) in the band....we needed a mandolin player....I needed a mandolin...I traded my '61 Gibson J50 (it needed work) for a Mann F5....a few years later sold the F5 for what I had paid for the J50 and put the money toward my A5 -2 Flatty that I still have today.

[John Soper]

College band- too many guitars (2-3) in the group, so I had to find niche instrumental roles- slide guitar, fingerpicking rather than flatpicking, and a cheap Kay mando chanced my way... Fast forward 10 years later, Kay long gone and I was in a bluegrass band where you could be the guitarist if you were the fastest one changing a broken string... I lost, so found a Kentucky A model in a pawn shop for $65, and playing ever since these past too many years. And a few more mandolins. Mostly swing/jazz and rock & roll these days (don't tell my wife I need an emando) :)

[JeffD]

I chose mandolin because everyone was playing guitar. In fact that whole guitar and cigarette too cool for school thing was not for me. I could not have pulled it off.

[ColdBeerGoCubs]

A couple of lunatics and a gun.

[TJe153]

50% Sam Bush, and 50% Jeff Austin :)

[Malcolm G.]

Mando solo on Rod Stewart's Maggie Mae.

[JeffD]

My inspiration for playing mandolin, guitar, and banjo all came from my dad. One of my first memories as a child {around 5 years old} was watching him and listening to him play guitar and sing the old mountain ballads and the Monroe Brothers tunes, that is what got me wanting to be a musician.

That is great. Do you have his guitar?

[Jim Ferguson]

Hi Andrew.........sweeter after difficulties, eh.
Same family motto as us Canadian Fergusons...:-) Boar & thistle coat of arms no doubt.
Probably related somewhere down the road.
Keep pickin that mando!!!!!
Peace,
Jim Ferguson

[trevor]

Way back when I was 17 or 18, I wanted something that I could travel with and something different. There were too many guitars around and too many good players. I had also been introduced to Bluegrass by a friend, I saw Bill Monroe at Birmingham town hall in '72-3.

[Mandolin Mick]

As a teen, I was a rocker and played guitar & bass. But, then I became interested in Classical guitar when I was in my early `20's.

Back in the mid `80's I was listening to a late night broadcast of Bluegrass Gospel on the AM superstation KXEL in Waterloo, Iowa. What really grabbed me was the sound of the mandolin, particularly on the album "A Lonesome Wail from the Hills" by Carl Story & his Rambling Mountaineers. It was Red Rector.

Then after that album they played a haunting mandolin solo that wasn't really Bluegrass and it was that song that sealed it for me; although I didn't know who played it for years. Later I found out it was Bill Monroe's "My Last Days on Earth" and it's my favorite song to this day. I keep my Kentucky tuned to that bizarre tuning so I can always pull it out and play that song.

ps - I was taping the music the night I heard that song and still have the casette, late-night AM static & all ... :)

[JeffD]

Cool is what YOU love, not what others think you should love.

One of those core truths. Well said.

[JeffD]

I somehow woke up one day and found myself as one of these dads.

That's the way the music continues. That might be the only way the music continues.

[Tom Haywood]

A friend loaned me a nice mandolin and asked me to teach her to play it for something called the Dances of Universal Peace. Of course, I had to learn to play it first so it sat in the closet for a year. Meanwhile, I had started attending bluegrass gatherings and discovered the usual problem – too many guitars. I wanted to stay on stage in order to learn all the songs, and I noticed that there was always, at most, only one mandolin player. So I pulled the mandolin out of the closet and went to chopping. It’s my main ax now. My friend eventually got a couple of rather useless lessons, but I got hooked on the mandolin for life. Well – three years so far, but I’m sure it is for life.

[Steve Ostrander]

When I was a teenager I started on guitar, but I had two friends that were both better gtr players than me, so I switched to bass. Then I went back to acoustic gtr and found myself in the same situation, so I switched to mandolin. Now I am the man because none of them can play mandolin!

Seriously, I find that the tuning in fifths to be much more intutive than guitar. I thought I would have trouble with the smaller neck and frets but it's never been a problem.

[Fran]

I have played guitar and other stringed instruments since the late 60's. But about 2 years ago I got into a "celtic wave" and listened to many recordings, most of which had mandolin sound in them. Doing some research I found out that the tuning was the same as a violin, and since I studied violin for a few years in the past, I got interested in trying out the mando. I started on a nice vintage sicilian bowl-back , then later acquired a A-shaped instrument and have enjoyed playing since, alone or in sessions. Recently my younger son told me he wanted to learn, so I found another A-shaped for him and started teaching him! Kind of contagious...:)

[tr6drvr]

Got reinterested in my bluegrass roots ( mid-70's) about a year or so ago. Had my old Kay standup that had followed me around all these years refurbished. Discoverd quickly that (a) lugging that beast to jams was more of a pain than I remembered from way back then and I had to borrow my wifes car to transport and (b) there always seemed to be one or more well accepted bass players at every jam. Right about then I went to the Joe Val festival ( Boston area) and saw Doyle Lawson/Quicksilver, Michael Cleveland/Flamekeeper (with Jesse Brock on Mando), and Sierra Hull all playing back to back. I lasered in on all that superb mando playing and thought, hey that thing only has like 4 stings like a bass, that can't be too hard, can't be very expensive, its really portable and looks like fun. So I got my wife to buy a starter for my birthday the next week. I sure found out pretty quickly that some of that was true and some not so true ( like it's not tuned like a bass or guitar, it's really difficult to get up to speed and learning those chop chords will cramp your fingers till you want to scream and it ain't no cheap instrument). But here I am a year (and 4 mando's) later, jamming and taking breaks without too much embarrassment and even singing lead from time to time, which I never did before. Who woulda thunk it.

-A recovering bass player

[Markus]

My inspiration for playing mandolin, guitar, and banjo all came from my dad. One of my first memories as a child {around 5 years old} was watching him and listening to him play guitar and sing the old mountain ballads and the Monroe Brothers tunes, that is what got me wanting to be a musician.

I apparently am one of those Dads, though I don't play the banjo.
[That Steve Martin song makes me want to, though]


That's the way the music continues. That might be the only way the music continues.

As far as I'm concerned, I'd like to pass along to my young daughter is that music is something you can do at home and can be a great joy.

I assume she'll play some instrument that annoys me in some style that is hard for me to appreciate, thus I limit my desired results to having making music a part of life.

[Dave Cowles]

Bluegrass festivals, starting in the '60s and '70s. I played guitar, and was entranced by the sound of mando, particularly in the slower, sweeter songs. Ricky Skaggs' playing (the Boone Creek album) pushed me over the edge and I took up mandolin seriously after over 40 years of playing guitar. I have decided that I can suck playing the mandolin just as much as I suck playing guitar.

[journeybear]

Maybe even more so! That's the spirit! :))

I never could play guitar. Too many strings :disbelief: - six strings, four fingers, does not compute. Four double strings - perfect! :mandosmiley: I can play bass, too, and in fact had one before the mandolin, but now my fingers have been scrunching for so long bass has become difficult as well. No worries, quite happy with my choice of instrument. :mandosmiley:

[TonyEarth]

well, i'd been playing violin for a long time, and a relative of someone who played with me told me the mandolin is the same as violin tuning. i always wanted to play a strummed instrument without having to learn new tuning. id say: like.. tuning a guitar like a violin. well, that wasn't necessary because i heard of the mandolin, same tuning, same (more or less) spacing for the fingers... and well.. i got a cheap one and started.. i love it... sometimes even more than the violin...

[JGWoods]

I'm 6'9" and 310 lb. I wanted something to hide behind...

[northfolk]

In 1970, I heard Billy in the Low Ground and Clinch Mountain Backstep as played by Les Thompson of The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band from the album Uncle Charlie and his dog Teddy. I was also one of the two guitar players in our group of three; so I decided to try the mandolin? And the rest is history? :mandosmiley:~o)

[Dave Peters from the UK]

It was seeing UK Rock and Roller Joe Brown live in concert playing one, about 20 odd years ago, I loved the sound.

[Nevin]

About ten years ago I found a mandolin in an antique store that was going out of business. They thought it was broken as the bridge was not on. I bought it for $30. It is a Kamico which is a precursor Kay and only made with that name for one year, 1927 if I recall correctly. The bridge was in the case. A new set of strings and a bit of tweaking and I have been playing ever since.

[TheBlindBard]

Ah, I love seeing threads like this, stories warm my heart :)
I played a little guitar in highschool (sophemore and junior year, I believe) but it never truly cliked. I was working on a project with a friend and my Mom called me to tell me that my first social security check came (for being disabled, saving up to use it for college or living on my own) and I asked, "Hey, can I buy a mandolin?" and she said sure. My friend and I were going there to get some new strings for my guitar, because the ones that were on it were pretty dead. We got the strings and I checked out the mandolins. I was mostly just strumming them and, something about it just clicked. I came back a month or so later and bought one at guitar center. I had a tinwhistle and learned "down by the sally gardens" on it and then brought it to mandolin. I asked lots of questions of a friend who was musical and that set me going :) I can't see myself putting the mandolin away for the foreseeible future. Learning traditional irish tunes and preparing for the day I'll be able to play at a session in reno. it's fun.

[Austin Bob]

I was playing acoustic guitar with a friend back in the early 80's, and he had an old Epiphone with a bent tuner key. I asked him to try it, and he sold it to me for $30, along with a Mel Bay chord book. Even though it sucked and was impossible to tune, I fell in love with it. I brought it to a local luthier, and he ended up selling me a very nice mandolin he had made for a client. That story is here (http://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/showthread.php?89859-Stephen-Wise-A-Model&highlight=stephen+wise).

I still have the book somewhere.

[bohemianbiker]

Was at an Indigo Girls concert, and Amy Ray was strumming a mandolin in one of the songs, and I thought: "I can play chords on guitar, I should be able to do that." Foolish, yes, but it got me back into music, both playing guitar again (in a mandolin orchestra), and taking mandolin lessons for nearly 2 years now. Am loving it. My 9 year old niece is learning violin, and we sometimes play together. I'd somehow forgotten how much I loved playing music, but it's been a blessing coming back. bb

[Cue Zephyr]

I listened to country. Then I discovered bluegrass. I found that a lot of (even modern) country tracks had a mandolin in it. Even the most poppy ones had some mandolin tones poking through here and there. I suppose it doesn't scream 'country' from the rooftops like a banjo seems to do, and to a lesser extent the dobro.

The mandolin also seemed like a great instrument to use in recordings. Adds a nice flavor to anything and is easy to mix in as it has no problem poking through a mix due to it's timbre. And it isn't too obvious, it sits well in any mix where there's an acoustic guitar also.

I've played (mostly acoustic) guitar for a few years and thought the next logical instrument to pick up in my favorite genre would be the mandolin. I still love bluegrass music and continue listening to it and loving it more and more. I have my mind set on picking up the banjo next, and hope to pick up the dobro at some point also.

I loved the mandolin's sweet tones and it's split personality which I only really discovered when I purchased one. It has a sweet side (due to where it lives in terms of frequencies) and a somewhat mean side i.e. the bark it gives you when you play bluegrass chop chords.

I neglected learning the instrument for a long time, doing some noodling from time to time, but it's only now - three years after the purchase that I've finally taken it up and practicing a lot. The level of bluegrass music just seemed too high to get into it so I never jumped on it. Until now. Right now I'm happily learning my jam tunes and hoping to pay my first visit to a bluegrass festival in my country (The Netherlands). Hopefully I've learned all the important tunes and picked up the banjo by that time! :)

[CSIMelissa]

Peter Buck from REM made me want to play. After 20 or more years of saying I wanted to "someday" because of him I finally quit putting it off and I bought my first mando a month ago and have enjoyed ever moment of my musical journey. Wish I could tell Peter what an inspiration he has been to me! LOL I'm still practically giddy whenever I pick up my mandolin to practice/learn.

[Eric Michael Pfeiffer]

What a great thread!
I've always been heavily influenced by my family from western Kentucky, especially my grandparents or "popaw" as we called him. From the time I was really small, I would spend 3 months every summer with my grandparents in Kentucky who lived in a little town about 34 miles south east of Owensboro Kentucky. All of my family is from northern Ohio county and southern Hancock county Kentucky. So being that my family was from Bill Monroe country, I've always been around bluegrass, old-time fiddling and country music from a very early age. My popaw had an old Kay mandolin and fiddle laying around that I used to fool with all the time although never seriously. I would go with him fishing in old farmponds and creeks and fox hunting ( like Bill Monroe, my grandfather and his father and grandfather before him were avid fox and coon hunters and loved to raise and run dogs.
They would also take me back in the hills to a little place called "Magans" ( not far from Rosine ) where they would hold square dancing in an old country store and feed store there. It's back in the hills and you have to travel up and down little narrow winding roads to get there. Anyways, while there, I used to watch folks do the Kentucky back-step and I heard banjo, fiddles, guitars and of course "the mandolin" quite a bit.
After playing in high school band and then learning rock guitar, I became serious about learning mandolin in my mid to late twenties so I bought one, a piece of junk, and started learning to play. After a year and a half or so I started going to jams and learning fiddle tunes and singing and eventually I bought a better mandolin, a Flatiron Fest "F" and also met Jerry Sanders who used to play with Carl Stories group "The Rambling Mountaineers" for a while. Jerry was forming a group called "Seminole Ridge" so he took me under his wing and taught me to sing tenor and how to really work a mandolin but then I quit after some years playing with them and recently have bought another mandolin and am trying to get back in the saddle again.
I think the fact that Bill Monroe plays a mandolin and is so soooo soooo much like my own grandfather, maybe playing the mandolin is more of a nostalgic thing. Bill walks, talks has the same expressions, and of course, that western Kentucky drawl exactly like my grandfather. Now that popaw is gone ( he passed after fighting with bone cancer in 2001 ) seeing and listening to Bill makes me think of my popaw and brings back alot of memories and makes me feel closer to him again. So I guess in a way that's why I gravitated towards the mandolin. I love the tremolo and the rapid fire of single notes and cross picking and the bassy chop. But beyond that, it's like a nostalgia. I'm proud of my heritage and proud of the fact that the greatest mandolin player that ever lived came from the same stock and ground as my own family....I guess I can just relate....well I guess I'm just digressing. Here is a picture of my grandparents and also a pic of me from when I was a youngin spending time in Kentucky with my family....I'm holding a little foxhound puppy that was recently born from a litter of two Walkers my grandaddy was breeding...111879111880

[Vernon Hughes]

Dewey Farmer!

[roysboy]

I was recording some acoustic demos for singer songwriters in our area . The demos were screaming for mandolin so I bought one and woodshedded with it til I felt competent enough to lay some colour on the tracks . Necessity is the mother of invention . Demos turned out pretty respectable ....but I was left with an addiction to this "little guitar" that no one warned me about .
Damn ....the first mandolin you get should be free, at least ........no ?

[brunello97]

HS girlfriend told me about a Super Bubba old-timer recluse Gulf Coast, TX neighbor who had an EM150. I thought it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. I cut that man's grass, painted his shed, hauled his trash, scraped up some do-re-mi and nailed it. Didn't have a clue about what it was or how to play it.

All downhill from there. Still have the Gibson. Still friends with my old GF. Swapping stories at the Mandolin Cafe. Tonight picking "It Ain't Necessarily So" on that old electric.

That's right, it ain't.

Mick

[Ryk Loske]

Age factors into this .. i'm 65.

I've been fascinated since a kid with folks who played an instrument and made people laugh. First for me was George Gobel on guitar. Then it was Homer & Jethro. Now factor in that my folks best friends were Italian and i heard a lot of Italian style mandolin which i liked. Then one night on Johnny Carson Homer & Jethro came out and just played. Did they ever! I got infected then .. but it's taken awhile for the disease to really develop. The chance to study with Don Stiernberg at Mandolin Camp North this coming spring has kept the guitars pretty much in their cases. The deeper the study the greater the love and intrigue.

Ryk

[TheBlindBard]

Ah, love all these stories :) great stuff.

[Eric Michael Pfeiffer]

Ah, love all these stories :) great stuff.

I agree..... very cool thread

[Steve Zawacki]

It's part of the quest to keep up with the grandkids. My 15-year-old granddaughter (after two years of playing) is now much better playing my guitars than I am after almost 50 years. She's never touched the mandolin, so I now have a temporary chance to be her musical equal on some instrument (LOL). Add to that the mandolin is just plain fun,

[bohemianbiker]

Peter Buck from REM made me want to play. After 20 or more years of saying I wanted to "someday" because of him I finally quit putting it off and I bought my first mando a month ago and have enjoyed ever moment of my musical journey. Wish I could tell Peter what an inspiration he has been to me! LOL I'm still practically giddy whenever I pick up my mandolin to practice/learn.

I used to listen to REM all the time, altho that was before I became "mandolin conscience." What songs does Peter play mandolin on? At the moment a riff from Losing My Religtion is going thru my head that may be a mandolin. bb

[Jai]

'Losing My Religion' was very prominent when I was first getting interested in mandolin in the early 90s - but it was actually hearing The Waterboys' '"Fisherman's Blues" that made me want to play the mandolin. And as luck would have it my dad had bought my youngest brother a cheap mandolin (plywood antoria A style) - my brother is a violin player and my dad felt, not unreasonably, that he would also be able to play a mandolin. Back in the 60s and early 70s my dad had been friends with Dave Swarbrick (and all the Fairport guys to be precise) and so I guess his reasoning was based on fact. Anyhow, as it happened, my brother didn't get on so well with it and I started teaching myself things on it. And then I hitchhiked round Europe and needed something small and easy to carry to busk with. And so, by default, the mandolin became mine.
Over the next 10 years I really used the mandolin only occasionally, being mainly a guitar player. And then the mando was really only for adding tremolo picking and chords to recordings until the movie 'O Brother Where Art Thou' came out - and then I wanted to play bluegrass... so out came the mandolin again- but frustrated me 'cause it was such a poor quality mandolin. So, I upgraded to a Crafter ovation-style mandolin, I know, not suitable for bluegrass, but a huge step up from the Antoria, which I gave back to my, now adult, younger brother.
The next step was going to see Tim O'Brien at our local Arts Centre, he was doing a tour of the UK and I long for him to come back and play here again- but I think coming all the way over to the UK and playing tiny venues is not economical for him. By then I realised I wanted to play the mandolin properly and needed a solid-wood carved mandolin to get the sound I wanted. And that's where mandolin cafe comes in, and the internet- because before the internet (the antoria days were before the internet for me) it was hard to get any real information on things like mandolins. And up until the last few years affordable, high quality mandolins had been hard to come by.
So, I read great reviews of The Loar mandolins. I found somewhere in Europe (the only place at the time) where they could be bought, and the LM300 had just come out (it wasn't even on The Loar website at the time) and the price was right. And since then, it's safe to say, the mandolin has become my main instrument. I barely play the guitar these days. Chris Thile, Tim O'Brien, Ricky Skaggs, Frank Wakefield et al have replaced Jimi Hendrix, Robbie Robertson, Richard Thompson, Keith Richards et al (well not quite, I still love those guys). And as my last post of 2013 details, I now am the proud owner of a Gibson A9 - the most wonderful instrument I have ever owned - finally making up for the deep-seated regret of selling a Guild X175 guitar to buy a laptop when I was doing my Masters degree 15 years ago. And the mando journey continues (it's Bach this year)... :mandosmiley:

[Drewsey]

I didn't even know what a mandolin was until about an hour before I bought one.

For a long time I had considered learning an instrument, but never made any effort to start until last Nov when I was struck with the whim to buy one. I spend a lot of time in front of a computer, and wanted to find something small I could entertain myself with at my desk. So I went to Guitar Center's website to look at inexpensive ukulele's, and that's when I stumbled upon some pictures of mandolins.

I went to youtube to hear what one sounded like, and was hooked right away. Not only did it fulfill my need for a small instrument, but I also loved that I didn't know anyone who played one.

My only regret is not discovering it sooner.

[Shortloin]

I also started with guitar (electric & acoustic) for almost 30 years ago. In the autum of 2003 I moved out to the countryside with my girlfriend and we started a family which led to less time playing in bands. Then for two years ago I stood in for a surgery which I prepared for by training at a small gym that we have here in the village. The guy responisble for the gym, Jimmy, is a huge county and bluegrass fan and asked me if I could sit in on some sessions with his band. We found ourselfes in a situation where we had THREE guitarists and after a while I got a bit bored from playing off-beats on the guitar so I pulled an old battered Levin mandolin from the shelf and asked how this was played...? No one really knew how and I raised to the challenge.

From that day I was hooked on bluegrass and mandolin, and for a long time we lifted weights for one hour and then we immediatly relocated to the other part of the building and ripped into bluegrass on a small tiny instrument for another hour. :)

[Bob Bledsoe]

Just over a year ago I was jamming with a friend on my ukulele, he on guitar. He said, "I have a mandolin that's been sitting in a case for the last 10 years. Do you want it?" I said, "sure, I'll take a mandolin, what is it like 6 strings?"... I learned a lot on that (virtually unplayable) mandolin and then upgraded to a JBovier that I'm very happy with. I'm now playing mandolin in a band. At this point, the mando gets slightly more of my attention than the ukulele.

[Shanachie]

While working in Vicksburg, Mississippi a friend invited me to bring by guitar and jam with a few of her friends. One of them had a mandolin that was sitting unplayed. Once I picked it up I could't put it down. That planted the seed that I needed to get one. Years later and a move back to AZ, I finally got around to getting one. I didn't really start to learn it well until I started playing fiddle.

[Pasha Alden]

A dabbler in music all my life, I played piano, recorder at school, only to grade 1. Then in high school the guitar adopted me and I enjoyed that. Not classical gtuitar I should say. Then I received a trophy in school for music, that for my guitar playing. Some none of the mentioned instruments took off. I played, but the broad neck of the guitar and the size of my hands did not seem to facilitate learning classical guitar. For years I played an electronic instrument a cross between harp and guitar with a tinkling sound: omnichord. However, I don't mind electronic instruments, but the inability to play with feeling and the limitations of the omnichord made me outgrow it.
in 2002-3 I skipped grade one to play grade two music examination and pieces on violin. That went well enough, but hiring the violin, paying R460 plus a similar amount per month for lessons and being tired after work to handle the demands of violin made me stop.
In 2012 I heard a live version of the song "Mandolin Rain" by Bruce Hornsby and the Range. It was beautiful. I knew I had to play mandolin. Also the tiny size of neck and closeness of strings suited my hands and for some reason the mandolin found me and I it. I've never looked back. It has healed and enriched my life and I can say I have found the right instrument to express myself musically.
I play with a plectrum, or finger style.
A highlight was participating in the Human Chain Service in honour of Mr. Mandela on Friday 21 February. An experience that meant so much.

[Pasha Alden]

Also meant to say that I played oeboe for a short while. However, this instrument had demands of its own and beautiful as it was, I did not stick with that.

[Carl Robin]

When my cousin died in late 2011, I was given his cello. I worked on it, replacing the bridge, and learned how to play "Twinkle Twinkle little Star", and "Mary had a Little Lamb", etc.--by St Patrick's day 2012. My goal was I had to learn how to play something on it by then. Then I had a brain-storm. I could tune up that old mandolin, the one from Grandma's attic, and learn patterns on it--since it's tuned similarly, I could then apply those patterns on the cello. It was a 1920's "Tater-bug" mandolin. I ordered strings, tuned it up, and was having fun with it for 2 weeks, until a crack appeared. I got a $50 flat back right away to keep practicing. Since then 2 more mandolins have come into my home. I can really play the Irish music that had always been an unattainable goal for my other instruments. The cello looks great in my living room. I'll pick it up again some day, but for now, at least, mandolins rule.

[JeffD]

Whenever I say "before the internet" I get self conscious. I know that for many out there it sounds like "before they had cars". The internet is as ubiquitous as the sidewalk, and even to me can feel like it has always been there.

Luckily you do not need to be all that old to have been around before the internet.

So in the beginning (post #91 this thread) and also here, I learned on a four string banjo (http://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/entry.php?666-My-First-Mandolin-was-a-Banjo). But later I had a mandolin and I had three books, the Jack Tottle Bluegrass Mandolin book, the Appalachian Fiddle by Miles Krassen, and the Fiddle Book by Marion Thede.

Later, but still well before the internet, the only sources of mandolinformation I could get were my subscription to Mandolin World News and Mandocrucians Digest, and Frets magazine. I did not know anyone that played mandolin.

Getting the digest and the world news in my PO Box was like getting on here at the café. It was a connection to a whole universe of mandolinning that was, for the most part, not visible around me. I read every word, every letter over and over.

I remember the downer I would feel after reading through and then knowing I had to wait.

[Jeff25]

I played sax in HS band, but never really learned the big picture. Always working on my part, ya know? Somewhere in the mid 00's I was listening to Chris Thomas King and decided to get my first guitar. Summer before last I saw a Washburn m108swk in a guitar store and fell in love with the old, worn look, and that chocolate color. I bought it, not knowing the first thing about Mando, and plunked around on it occasionally. Recently I found myself in that third wheel guitar spot and decided it was time to give it an honest go. It's been so much fun, and I feel like I'm learning fast; faster than I did on guitar. So I guess you'd say G.A.S. Got me started.

[WagonWheel]

I watched Ron McCoury perform live at a bluegrass festival.

[AlanN]

Later, but still well before the internet, the only sources of mandolinformation I could get were my subscription to Mandolin World News and Mandocrucians Digest, and Frets magazine. I did not know anyone that played mandolin.

Getting the digest and the world news in my PO Box was like getting on here at the café. It was a connection to a whole universe of mandolinning that was, for the most part, not visible around me. I read every word, every letter over and over.

I remember the downer I would feel after reading through and then knowing I had to wait.

Too wise. And the way the MWN subscription was handled was a trip sometimes. Nothing for months, then 2 in a row, lol. Niles' issues were great, full of stuff. And I'll add the Andy Statman Bluegrass book, by Oak. It had some good tunes, with 2 lines of tab - the melody (mostly), then underneath a kind of take-off version. I learned a lot from it. FRETS was good because it had workshop authors - Rice, Grisman, Crary, others. Dawg's columns were a bit sporadic but worth every dime - exercises, how to hold the right hand, tunes - a 2 issue reading of Joy Spring, Soldier's Joy, Happy Birthday, Bill Monroe, What Child Is This, others. I was saddened when that magazine folded. Another one was Acoustic Musician, Niles was a contributor.

[Marc Ferry]

When I was 5, I decided to play the viola because I wanted to be in the elementary school orchestra. I ended up hating the viola. Practices were a bore. Lessons were the low point in my day.

Two years later, I was sitting through my sister's school concert, having trouble staying awake. All of the sudden a bluegrass band called "Wooden Spoons" walks on stage. They're just a few high schoolers on the fiddle, guitar, and mandolin, but the music mesmerizes me... especially the mandolin! A few months later, I picked up the mandolin at the young age of 7 and quit the viola.

At first, I really liked the mandolin. It was cool learning a new instrument, and I liked how unique the mandolin was. People were very impressed by it. But after a year or so, I started treating the mandolin like something I had to do. Had to practice. Had to go to lessons. The mandolin started to be like the viola.

Fast forward to the age of 12, and slowly I realize something. I gain a whole new perspective on music. Music isn't something that should be boring. Music is a form of expression. Music is beautiful. Music is incredible. Music should be played to please and express the self.

I start playing the mandolin a ton, and boy do I have fun. I used to set up rigid practice schedules. Now I'm grabbing my mandolin all the time. Playing songs, learning new songs, improvising on songs, composing songs, whatever.

Fast forward to now (age 14), where the mandolin is one of the greatest passions of my life!

[fentonjames]

well, i've been playing guitar for around 40 years. always a fan of music, always loved sam bush and david grisman, bill monroe and bluegrass in general. around 15 years ago i got my first mandolin, a bowlback. well, at that time, i sorta fell into this, i'll never learn trap and sold it. fast forward to around 2 years ago. i'm working in a guitar store that sells some mandolins. i figured someone should know how to demo one, so i bought the f style we had, a oscar schmidt om-40. turns out it was more of a mandolin shaped object, but i did realize i could play now. btw, i had a small stroke 3 years ago and it's done weird things to my brain. perhaps the key to mandolin opened the door. i can now deal with the smaller fretboard. well, someone handed me their loar one day and i realized how crappy mine was. so, i got a loar and really started learning. then i was going to be sitting in with a grateful dead band, guesting rather, and needed an electric and got a godin. which after that stint, traded for a big muddy and now i have my weber. i don't recommend having a stroke, but something did click mandolinwise for me.

[gwh17]

Heard Nickel Creek play "Cold Frosty Morning" and was hooked instantly.

[Brandon Flynn]

Listened to Nickel Creek's first album on a car ride in 8th grade with a College student helping out with our youth group. From the first clear notes Thile played on "Ode to a Butterfly" I was hooked on the clear, focused, bright sound of the instrument and had to get one as soon as possible. Ditched the guitar and discovered the many many forms of music out there that are easy to miss in Middle School and in this culture in general if you only hear music on tv or the radio.

[Theo 413]

I've been playing electric guitar and bass for over 20 years, but recently I've really started paying more attention to traditional acoustic instruments. I've been a long time fan of traditional irish music as well as a bunch of the irish / punk bands out there. Seeing The Tossers back in 2008 (I think it was '08) is what really got me intrigued with the mandolin. Finally picked up my first one this past month (The Loar LM-520) and having a blast getting acquainted with it!

[Brandon Sumner]

I have been playing one string instrument or another all my life, started with cello in school ( wish I still had it! ), banjo (gasp) and various guitar styles, mostly classical. Started developing arthritis in my right thumb and finger style was getting painful. My grandfather it is told played mandolin in a band when my mother was a kid, that always intrigued me, so I thought I would try it. Fell in love with it right away, just seems a natural fit for me all around, sold all my guitars and have not looked back since.

[Jim]

Started guitar in 1968, played Blues , Rock, country & Folk often supporting singer song writers that also played guitar. Became more interested in Bluegrass in the late 70s listening to Dillards, Dave Grissman and Newgrass Revival. AKUS in the early 90s finally made me decide to take up Mandolin to bring a different voice to the guitar heavy groups I was playing with. It came easy and I quickly discovered it was a good fit for me.

[John Lloyd]

Short version: Guitars.

Long but still very condensed version: Clarinet was my first 'serious' instrument at age 11, followed quickly by sax. Picked up guitar a couple of years after that, then bass, then keyboards, and a bunch of other random stuff on the side. (I play guitar well, but bass has always been my #1 part-time cash cow. Different topic, though.)

Bought a Flatiron 1N when I was 20-something, at least partly because it was easy to carry on a submarine. Played around with it; drifted away from the instrument for a while. Got out of the service, got into guitar jams. Got tired of showing up and finding multiple guitars already flailing away in open G.

Picked up fiddle, which is really what got me back into mandolin. Oh yeah, I'd kept the 1N all those years. Guys at Gibson gave it a de facto overhaul. (Would it get them in trouble if I said they did it essentially for free?)

Played fiddle, played viola, played the 1N. Recently bought a Gold Tone A-style. Love it.

These days my mandos get almost equal time with violin. Now I'm looking at mandolas too, and seriously thinking about a Big Muddy when finances allow it.

I'll take mandolin over guitar, for a whole essay's worth of reasons. I'm also quick to advocate it, to anyone who'll listen, as a great option to consider for a beginner's first instrument.

Fun, versatile, and stays challenging too. What's not to like?

[Bruce Cech]

I played the guitar in high school and part of college. Stopped playing when I was 20 and sold my guitar stuff to buy an engagement ring. I know--don't want to hear it. Haven't touched a guitar in 50 years. bought one when I turned 70. A lot of it was remembered but it just wasn't coming back the way I wanted. Small hands, old age made it difficult to hold chords. I liked the sound of the mandolin and with the smaller neck I thought I'd give it a try. I've only been at it short time but very happy with my choice. My wife is bedridden and suffers from dementia all due to a couple of strokes three years ago. I tend to her 24/7 and this gives me something fun to do in the meantime.