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You're not alone. I never go there because I found my "keeper" the first time out buying a mandolin after doing a ton of research, and being fortunate enough to have a budget for a good handmade...

@Sue: Another aspect of this is picking the right group to play with, assuming you have a choice. If you're not ready for the speed the fiddlers are playing, is there another jam or session you can...

The advice above is good, just a few more thoughts here. As a preamble, I'll note that fiddlers have a technical advantage over our flatpicked instruments, because they can slur a run of notes. I...

The "last forever" part is something I consider a drawback, at least with respect to intonation. The tone does seem to last forever because the strings don't lose brightness the way PB roundwounds...

Thomastik Stark gauge flatwound strings have wound A strings.

Expensive, but everyone should try Thomastik strings at least once. They didn't work for me because I need a brighter "cut" in the...

I tried it, briefly, on my octave mandolin. Didn't like it. I mostly play Irish/Scottish melody lines on my OM ("fiddle tunes"), and hearing the octave jump within the melody line was too...

I'm in the "tone comes from your right hand" camp. It pays to be constantly aware of what you're doing, and not get complacent and lazy about your picking.

When I'm in the middle of an...

When I play some of the slower Irish/Scottish tunes, an adjacent string pair may still ring out a little and clash with the following notes. It's more of an issue on the octave mandolin with longer...

At one time I had a small collection of metal-body roundneck Dobro guitars from the 1930's where they used a "trapeze" tailpiece similar to that one, and it was common to see them broken. Just a poor...

This might show some of the potential, although the video quality is poor. The first bit is Zenkl playing the Breedlove 4-string mandola on a slower tune with something akin to a guitar fingerstyle...

As others have said, one issue is volume, but another is the double course strings and the way that interacts with fingernails or bare fingers. There is only one acoustic mandolin family instrument...

I remember one quote from, I think, his early instructional DVD where he looked so young on the cover. He said (paraphrasing) that you should try to figure out where the important phrases are in a...

Reverence for the wood is a fine thing. One reason I've never looked for another mandolin after buying my first one, is that the luthier -- Jiri Lebeda in the Czech Republic -- used Redwood from the...

I'll second Adrian's comment about E strings being basically the same from the various brands, so I wouldn't be looking there for a fix. The differences are in the wound strings.

You said your...

I don't think this is a controversial take, but maybe it is. Anyway, I think Bluegrss is played fast because it's performance music; stage music, designed to excite an audience that is listening but...

I spent a couple of years doing wedding gigs on mandolin as a duo with a guitar player. Mostly with our compact PA or sometimes even two PA setups at different parts of the venue, but we did several...

I agree the octave mandolin is something of a mongrel from the Classical music perspective. But of course that's just one perspective. Us non-classical OM players find plenty of other uses for it.
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I agree the tune would dictate the approach in most cases. For example, DUD DU DU DU is how I start "Brenda Stubbert's Reel -- sheet music here at thesession.org.

It helps preserve the secondary...

That's painting with a very wide brush, considering how many different types of folk music there are. The music I play on mandolin is Irish/Scottish trad. Most mandolin players I've known who focus...

Hi Max, I don't have any problems with this setup, but it's mainly due to training myself to be careful with the setup after some embarrassing incidents. Like stepping on the mic cord and pulling the...

This is how I use my DPA 4099 with a ToneGard. The bottom part off the clip sits inside that little gap in the ToneGard:

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That's what I do. No capo or tape. I do use a manual pegwinder to speed things up after the string is locked.

I probably should remove all or half the strings to clean the fretboard, but it's...

I believe from experience that the following things are true, assuming you're using an appropriate string gauge for the scale of your instrument, which is the tricky part. I think most of us who go...

People who come to the mandolin after experience on guitar often miss the advantages of standard (narrow) necks, because some of the fingering techniques are different.

For example, the ability...

Charlie, if you go for the Bose S1, be sure to budget for a speaker stand. With the speaker firing up high, you get a better dispersion across the room and you're not just blasting the front row of...