The first time you touched a mandolin...

[cedarhog]

Can you remember the first time you touched a mandolin? Can you remember what you felt? Did it speak to you? What did you want to accomplish with it once you decided it was your instrument of choice?

I remember playing guitar and having a mandolin passed over the counter at Ken Cartwrights shop. He smiled and said be careful mandolins can be addictive. I thought it was cute, very shiny, felt solid but very light, very detailed...and a lot of strings. I bought it on a whim....took it home found mandolin cafe, found some tablature and learned my first tune "Old Joe Clark" and from that point I put the guitar down and never really went back to it. All I ever wanted to do was to have the desire to continue to pick up the mandolin and continue to learn and excel at it. So far so good......:mandosmiley:

[ColdBeerGoCubs]

I do. As a big deadhead and a lover of Old and In the Way and celtic music i loved the instrument. Then one day a friend of mine, bass player and a highle regarded guitar playing friend came up to me and said, " You're playing an instrument, which one?"

Next day I bought a 50 dollar Rogue and was hooked. And after a night of getting hammered and having it cost me my girlfriend, it's still my best friend and I have a feeling it always will be. Addicting is an understatement.

[Willie Poole]

As a teen ager and hearing Monroe and other bluegrass pickers of that time period I asked my dad for a mandolin for my 16th birthday and he bought me a nice one that was a Martin like copy, never did know the name of it, I played guitar at the time and a friend showd me some mandolin chords and I taught myself the rest and have been playing the mandolin ever since...BTW that was back in 1951 so you see I have quite a few years of learning things and I am still learning....The mandolin has opened up my life to meeting a lot of great people that I don`t believe I would have ever met had I not started playing the mandolin and bluegrass....Good subject, and I am interested in what others will say about there first time playing one....

Willie

[barney 59]

The first time I touched a mandolin was when Frank Wakefield showed me his and it spoke backwards!

[Geoff]

I didn't touch a mandolin until my ebay rover arrived in the mail 11 years ago. At the time I really loved Yonder Mountain String Band and I think (?) that's why I wanted one. Nowadays though, I really don't care for that band or Jeff Austin's mandolin playing. I learned Whiskey before Breakfast off the internet and started a pretty miserable bluegrass outfit with a few buddies. We tried pretty hard though :) Some of those guys ended up playing at the Old Settlers Bluegrass festival outside of Austin, TX later. It took me a while to start playing the mandolin like a mandolin, or mandolinisticly, as my teacher would say.

[BlueMt.]

The first mandolin I touched was in 1971. It was an old bowl back I rescued from my wife's great aunt's estate. It had a cracked fingerboard and would have made a fine cheese slicer. I finally had it repaired about 10 years later and started learning to play. I quickly moved on to something better but my youngest son still plays it on occasion.

[Phil Goodson]

I honestly have lost the memory of what made me consider playing a mandolin.
But after strumming guitar for 40+ years, almost 4 years ago I decided I needed to try a mandolin. I had just gotten through some really bad times with my health and needed something new.

I ordered a used Michael Kelly from a guy on the web who had given up trying to learn the mando. A $250 investment turned into an obsession within a few weeks. Within 6 months, a used Weber arrived and it was off to the races.
I sat on the back row at the local jam and chopped quietly. Lots of studying and practicing at every spare moment. Some lessons followed. Another step up in mandolins within a year or so.
I've been hooked ever since. 3 jams a week, meeting new friends, best thing that ever happened to me (except for wife & kids).
Whew! ........ Thanks for asking.

[jim_n_virginia]

It was around 1984 and I was living and street busking down in New Orleans and the 1962 VW van I was sleeping in blew a head gasket and a dude I met traded me a 60's era Harmony flat top mandolin that was rattle can spray painted white and few afternoons showing me all the 2 finger chords for that old van.

I loved that old mandolin and I panhandled with it for months until my girlfriend got mad at me an broke it! LOL!

Didn't get another mandolin until 1999. :mandosmiley:

[Mike Snyder]

I got tired of standing around with my hands empty, like Art Garfunkel. 1973 or 4, a buddy played guitar and we played house parties and keggers. I knew the lyrics to all the country outlaw tunes he played. I've sung harmony since, well, forever. We weren't really a band until I got an instrument. The same year I got my first junker, was my first year at Winfield, and I was hooked on acoustic music.

[Jim Kirkland]

Mid 50's dad gave all 3 boys something to play in church. I was about 8 yrs old. He taught us 3 cords, G C and D. We could finally strum a few songs with him as he sang a few songs. I got the mandolin. Been in the heart since.

[allenhopkins]

Found three old cases in my grandfather's attic, years after he died and about the time my great-aunt had to sell the house. No-name gut-strung banjo, B & J Victoria bowl-back mandolin, and c.1920 Gibson A-1 with a big top crack patched with adhesive tape. It was around 1970, and I was thinking of starting a bluegrass band with my brother and my friend Bob. It's been all downhill since, I'm afraid...

[Jack Roberts]

It was a cheap Samick in the local music shop. I thought "I could learn to play this!" I've been proving myself wrong ever since then.

[JeffD]

A buddy in highschool that I knew from band handed me a bowlback mandolin, told me where the fingers go. I had never heard mandolin music before, at least not that I knew was mandolin music, and I didn't know anything about bluegrass or Bill Monroe. You could have told me he was the brother of the fifth president of the United States and I would have believed you.

[fishtownmike]

Actually after i tried to play the mandolin for the first time I hung it back on the wall where it hung for at least ten more years before I gave it a serious try again. I played guitar for years before that and it was my love. I had serious problems with the small frets and neck that it was discouraging. But then i was listening to some Dawg and Jerry Garcia music and I got the bug again and I really put my all into it and that was that. It now has over taking the guitar as my favorite instrument and I couldn't put it down if I tried. :)

[Ivan Kelsall]

The first time i 'held' a Mandolin was shortly after i began playing Uke in 1963.The guy at my workplace who tought me, brought an old flat back Mandolin in & showed me the 3 basic 2 finger chords.That was it until my late Canadian freind,David Tinkoff from Ottawa,came over to stay with me & brought his Heiden - i played the same 3 chords but the sound was a bit different,
Ivan:grin:

[Bob Borzelleri]

It was the summer of 1958. I was 14 and had left home to find something better. I was packing pears in a shed near Clear Lake, California and living in an attic room at a rooming house in Lakeport. The woman who owned the house was Italian and I guess she decided to rent to me rather than seeing a nice Italian boy sleeping on the beach.

One of the many days when I had nothing to do other than try to recuperate from standing on a line in a packing shed, I nosed around a old storeroom off my room in the attic. That's where I dug out an old bowl back mandolin.

I won't pretend to recall much detail about the instrument. I remember that I had a sense that the instrument was some sort of connection to my heritage. I should have asked permission to play with it because soon after I started making sounds with it, the landlady came up and asked me to put it back. It had been her husband's and it still meant something to her.

By the end of that summer, my parents had both died, I returned to what had been my home and I didn't touch any other mandolin for over the next 25 years.

Those Eastman bowl backs make me think of that summer.

[bigbike]

Well, banjo is my first love. Always will be. So of course when a banjo-mandolin cam up for auction, I had to have it. It helped that it was made by a company that I collect (SS Stewart) in old instruments. Oddly it is hanging on the wall because of a failing heel and needs to be sent out to be repaired. But joy upon joy-someone gave me an old "A" cheapie that needed to have a collapsing top fixed. Which I did. And at the same time, a person whose career I follow started using mandolin in rock and punk rock music. Okay so now my interest is peaked. See I always relegated mandolin to bluegrass music and I absolutely HATE the tinney top end that so many mandolins have when playing that music. You call it tremelo on the 1st string, I call it tinney. Then I got the opportunity to purchase a bowlback Stewart made. NOW that is my first real mandolin. feels good to hold, sounds great with great tone an sustain-and no tinny-ness but just terrific all around sound. Now I search for rock music that can be played on mandolin. After all who needs one more bluegrass instrument when you already play banjo, autoharp, mt. dulcimer. and jaw harp?

[Jim]

I probably don't remember when I first touched a mandolin , my father had one( an old Bowl back) sitting on top of our pump organ and I remember playing with it as well as the organ when I was very young. It is among the first memories I have.

[Bertram Henze]

I have a faint recollection of seeing a mandolin as a little child - it was a bowlback and looked cold, alien and forbidding to me - like a porcelain vase on a table, made to present a reason for punishment if I broke it, but not for fun.

My next encounter with a mandolin was at the age of 27. I had left university behind, and the traumatic years of violin lessons were vanishing, even further away. But I was lonely, a stranger in town and had taken to like Irish music. And there it was in a shop window, a cheap East German mandolin with a flat back. I got it, found out that it was tuned like a violin (enabling me to reuse the left-hand-technique I had almost forgotten), but without the memories of bad-breathed teachers making me play music I could not relate to and fail in front of my classmates. I felt this was a new start. Later that night, I hung it on a nail over my bed and felt wonderful with it being there and guarding my sleep.

[Mark Seale]

I was always intrigued by my dad's mandolin, and there is no telling when I first laid hands on it. As a toddler, I took it out of the case and sat on it. Broke the top... he did eventually get a new one.

[Tim2723]

I bought my first mandolin before I'd ever touched one or even knew what it sounded like. I'd never even heard of the instrument and knew no one who played it. I was 14 at the time and saw it in a Sears catalog. Just a picture of it was enough to hook me.

[chordbanger]

http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg226/misstoy_photos/003-19.jpg
My Uncle gave me this one and it was through a fire, so the first thing I noticed was the smell of smoke, then I noticed how someone carved out the peghead, and put plastic there for the tuning pegs. I played it for a while, but it was rough on my fingers, and it doesn't really sound much like a mandolin. It hangs up on the wall in my living room now.

[Mattg]

About 7 years ago I started building guitars. A friend of mine had a cheap mandolin with a cracked neck and asked if I could repair it. Even with the cracked neck, it could be tuned somewhat. I recall thinking that this style of instrument was like a cannon. The tension of the strings and arched plates just seemed like a lot of potential energy. Turns out, I couldn't fix the instrument.

The next mandolin I touched was one that I built at RockyGrass academy a few years later. That's really what got me going.

[John Durkan]

Iwas playing rythm guitar in a reggae band with friends i've had since grade school when we all decided to pack it in. A few months later the bass player called me and said he'd bought an accordion and our old keyboard player bought an accoustic guitar maybe i could bring my accoustic over and teach him a few chords and we could start jammin again. After a few months the other guitar player was gettin good at playing ryhtm and he had an old no-name mandolin hanging on his wall and a book of chords. I asked if I could take it home with me and was hooked. 10 or so years later, I still play guitar but mandolin is my instrument of choice these days. Still playin with the same friends too!

[James P]

1972? A friend bought a 1918 Gibson A that'd been lost in an attic for who knows how long. I remember it being the first time I'd ever seen "The Gibson" on a headstock. It was also the first time I smelled that musty but not unpleasant "old case" smell. Even with rusted strings it had that lovely deep tubby tone, which was another first. It didn't get me started on mandolin but it was a memorable experience.

[Charley wild]

I got a Gibson A in a trade about 1964. It was just thrown in to even up the money. I wanted it though, because I really liked John Duffey's solo on "These Men of God" on the Carnegie Hall album and was determined to learn it. I think I got a Mel Bay book that showed how it was tuned and also some chords. And away I went! I was playing guitar and Dobro then and it was a third instrument. It's still the same behind the lap steel and the banjo. I really like to play the mandolin and I wonder sometimes why I haven't spent more time on it.

[cedarhog]

Great replies so far enjoy reading them.:popcorn:

[Jill McAuley]

It was the summer of '07 in Walton's music shop in Dublin. I had come up to Dublin to visit my friend Pat, who is perennially late (hence me choosing a music shop to meet in so that I'd have something to do while I waited for him!) There was a cheap (McBrides - the shop's own brand) A- style hanging up and I somehow recalled that mandolins were tuned the same as fiddles, so I picked it up and played a few tunes on it and couldn't get over how much fun it was. I obsessed about mandolins for awhile after that but then got distracted by the tenor banjo, only rediscovering the joys of the mandolin when I moved to the States in '08.

Cheers,
Jill

[Marcus CA]

Well, banjo is my first love. Always will be.

That's a pretty daring statement to make here. What courage!!!

[Marcus CA]

I was visiting a buddy in San Diego twenty years ago, and he took me to a great music store in Oceanside. I don't remember it's name, but those of you who live around there can probably remind me. It had a great selection of guitars and a few mandolins, including a gorgeous old Gibson from the early '20's that was selling for $750 or so. Given the year and my paychecks, that was stratospheric money.

I had been a longtime fan of mando players, and already had been playing guitar for 20 years, but had NEVER touched a mandolin. That Gibson somehow locked eyes with me. :disbelief: So, I pulled down a few of the other mandolins that were half the price and noodled around on them until I got a sense of the lay of the land. Since none of the staff seemed aware or concerned about me, I pulled down the Gibson. Its sound was so much richer than the other ones and played like butter. You know the temptation. You know how rationalizations and justifications just flood your brain in that situation. You also know how logically your wife will react will react when you bring home a purchase like that to show her and your toddler. :redface: I left it behind, and to this day, it's still the one that got away.

[Ben Milne]

I was pretty young. It would have been My Old Man's, though I can't recall which one exactly, and I suspect it may not have been complete at the time. - I'd often help with bending sides, making jigs etc.
The first mando I played might have been his #1. I don't think it would have been his F-style as it was a replacement for a sentimental mando lost in a truck fire.

He built me a smaller scale mando for a birthday (or two) to suit my smaller hands, so using his child labour when he needed a hand was fair enough. I'd pretty much play fiddle tunes. This instrument was later sold to an elderly accordianist woman who appreciated the shorter scale.

I didn't really play again until 2 or so years ago, when i first spied a mandobird in a shop... interest has definitely risen again since then.

I grew up playing fiddle, so mando was a bit of pickin fun. Haven't touched the fiddle in years, though I try and make sure play mando each day (when possible.)
Unfortumately It doesn't get me out of washing and drying dishes like violin practice used to.

[Stamper]

Jill, I love your posts!

Okay, true story:

I'd seen a few mandolins, and I was a very experienced guitar player, however amateur, and each time I reached for a mandolin -- mostly not good ones, really -- I thought: lot of money, stocky fingers, let it go:

this is the true part. I had been sick. Really sick, the kind we don't like to talk about, and I had to go in for the Big Test:

It was also my Birthday! Really, the actual day. My Birthday.

Long story short:

My birthday, I was replacing a guitar that had been stolen (my beloved Lowden) and it was a really, really good shop, and there were these pretty mandolins on the wall. So I tinkered a lot with the wall, and so doing I became smitten with a beautiful Breedlove spruce and maple thing, and i could smell the sawdust, and in the morning I was to have the test which was to determine if I lived or died.

I bought it, like that. I said, I love this thing!

Two weeks later, I traded up for a Collings, but the point is: I lived, and I loved the thing! The instrument has changed my life. Meanwhile my big medical tests came out okay. I'm alive and healthy! I have a great mandolin.

I am so glad to be here among you all --

Life is Good!

S

[Jock]

The first mandolin I touched was around 25 years ago; a sobell south paw, so I didn't get very far with that instrument.

[Flattpicker]

There was nothing special about my first four or five mandolins, so I don't remember any magic moments with them. I do remember the first time I played an Ellis F. It was mind-blowing. I'm sure there are a few other builders whose work would have a similar effect, but for now that's the otherworldly, high-water mark for me.

[GRW3]

This got lost in yesterday’s Café update…

I don’t know when I first picked up a mandolin. They always seemed to be around in the music stores (pick it up – plinky, plinky – cute). My friend Ron had a cheap one and I became more interested when he was shopping for a new one. He taught me a few chords to strum so he could hear the voice.

My research partner at the time was a semi professional Irish musician and we often talked about music. I told him I was interested in the mandolin. He said he had one I could borrow, a kit built f-style he bought from an in-law. He said it wasn’t great but it played in tune. So couple of days later he brought in this green stained mandolin. The neck was slightly warped but playable, over the first few frets anyway.

It wasn’t a very good mandolin but it was enough to get me hooked. I bought the Dix Bruce intro book and learned a few more chords and a few tunes. I was hooked. Besides loaning me the mando, my friend gave me some sage advice; buy the best instrument in your budget from which you can hear a significant difference. I ended up with a Mid Mo M0, their least expensive model. It was clearly better than the cheap imports but all of their models sounded pretty much the same to me at that time.

[Capt. E]

The first mandolin I really looked at was a used Flatiron 1M for sale at Ray Hennigs' Heart of Texas Music. I wondered why such a simple looking instrument was selling for $700? It disappeared after a while, but then I saw a Mid-Missouri in a pawn shop that had a good case and a neat custom strap. I did some research (how I found the Mandolin Cafe) and realized it was a good deal at $300.00. I couldn't resist. Then the journey began in earnest.

[gkraushaar]

The year was 1979. I was trying to get a bluegrass band started. I found a bass player, a banjo player, and a guitar picker. I was already an experienced guitar player and a decent banjo player, but these other guys couldn't play anything else, so I said I'd play the mandolin. I quickly bought a Japanese Alvarez, woodshedded for two weeks, and played my first festival on mandolin the next week. I sweated so much I ruined the strings the first night.

[Mandolin Mick]

It was back in the mid `80's and I believe it was an Epiphone A model. To a classical guitarist and bassist like me it felt like a toy, but I soon loved it!

[johnny]

My friend was cleaning out his Grandpa's house last summer, found a couple old mandolins and gave me one. It's an old Spanish A-style oval hole. I couldn't put it down and now I bought an Eastman 514 (love the oval hole and the scroll is beautiful!) and signed up for the Delfest Academy.

[Mandoviol]

It was the summer of 2008, and I figured that, since I'd been playing violin for so long, it was time to learn another instrument. This came after my dad bought a Washburn classical guitar, and I, being a guy who plays things tuned in fifths, wanted to get in on the action. So, after doing a little reading on the internet, I found out that the mandolin was tuned in the same way as fiddle, so I made my case (note: our house was rapidly filling with instruments--two violins, a baritone uke, assorted wind instruments, the guitar, a keyboard, and a set of bagpipes), and somehow got the go-ahead to make a purchase. I began looking around online for a decent instrument and stumbled on Mandolin Hut, saw they had a good deal on the Mastercraft (which Paul, the owner, gave a 5-star rating), and never looked back.

One might say the first time I touched the mandolin was when I opened the box...