Transition from bass to mando

[Borntoplay4strings]

Hey all, I've been playing electric bass guitar for about 11 years now (can play a good deal of guitar too) and I've enjoyed it more than anything. The past year changed that for me though. My brother who, was the singer/songwriter has gone to London for his masters degree, and we lost our drummers a while back so our band days are over. At least for the near future. I've decided to learn mandolin because it's always been one of my favorite sounding instruments and I'm looking for opinions on how the upside down string thing will conflict with my learning. I'm a very quick learner for the most part but the strings reversed will definitely mess with my improvisation abilities. Thoughts or experiences with with this topic?? I will have my new Loar LM-520 on Christmas so I'm getting excited as this new musical journey approaches.

[EdHanrahan]

Most folks will tell you to ignore and/or don't-get-sucker-punched-by the "upside down" tuning of mandolin, and there's a lot of truth to that. Mostly, try to treat it as a new instrument, except ...

Personally that knowledge DID help but just peripherally, mostly because I taught myself chords first, and getting mirror-images of the guitar's lower 4 strings (ya know, same as bass?) made it easy to find the mando chords. Hey, Em was the easiest because it's the same as guitar (a symmetrical 0220), as is D if you know where to play the guitar's low E string (being the same as the high E; okay, it's 2002). But that's just for basic 2-finger chords, and mandolin's close frets offer FAR more possible chord formations than guitar does.

What DID help for reading notation is that the E and D strings read EXACTLY the same as for guitar (realize that all guitar music sounds an octave lower than written), while the A and G strings have the same notes as guitar, just in a different octave. THAT realization made learning mandolin notation MUCH easier, but has little relation to the "upside-down-ness" of the strings' orientation.

Personally, I also play mandolin, guitar, and -especially lately- a lot of bass. It's all good, and they all feed into each other. (I sometimes laugh thinking that mandolin pairs are the "same size" as a bass string, but with 98% of the metal replaced by air. Yeah, I can be weird!)

[chuck3]

As the information to the left will indicate, I went through this too! First - I suggest you don't think about the upside down thing as such, just learn the chords on mando - or more specifically the patterns. The chords will seem very unfamiliar at first, but gradually you'll come to realize that the fifths tuning and short scale on the mando lets you apply patterns all over the neck. Second - once you get through that first phase of unfamiliarity, you'll see that mandolin is a very logical instrument, and that fifths tuning on a short scale instrument makes a lot of sense. Eventually, you will see the upside-down thing, but I suggest you let that come in an organic way once you familiarize yourself with the mando chords, rather than starting there. Third - you'll be in demand! Giving up guitar and adding mando and upright bass to go along with bass guitar made me somewhat of a gig magnet (not to be confused with a chick magnet). Did a gig the other night switching between bass guitar and mando, and that's common for me... throw in the upright and there's a lot of call for that skill set, at least here in the Hudson Valley.

[Kevin Winn]

I went through the same transition about a year and a half ago. Bassist for forty-odd years (and counting!), with lots of guitar thrown in. Best advice I got was to forget about the upside down thing. Learn it as a new instrument. The tonal skills you have built from bass playing will serve you well, but the mechanics are different. My struggle is to unlearn the associations of certain finger/muscle movements with scales, riffs, etc.

A lot like learning to read, where you start by sounding out every letter, then eventually move into whole word recognition, you've probably built up finger patterns that your brain knows produce certain scale combinations. You have to learn new ones, because the patterns that produce cool riffs on bass or guitar sound stupid on a mando...

It's fun to watch the process happen, though. Enjoy the journey!

[Borntoplay4strings]

Interesting that all 3 of you guys gave the same advice in "forgetting the upside down thing and just learning it as a new thing altogether." That's actually very helpful and I understand why you would say that. Thanks a lot, very helpful words of wisdom!

[red7flag]

I have just gone the other direction as our Praise Band needed a bass. For the past three months I have concentrated on learning the bass. When I do more be back to the mandolin, I find my timing improved. I find also that my playing has become smoother, less staccato. This was even noticed by the tracking engineer at my studio when I recorded mandolin last week. All the time practicing scales and arpeggios on the bass has has the unexpected result in improving my improvisation. I guess improving my music vocabulary has improved my writing. I would not have expected as much transfer from the bass to mandolin as I have seen. The reverse tuning has little effect for me also, other than adapting the techniques of playing fifths to fourths,

[Bob Visentin]

I also play bass and mandolin and the upside down thing means nothing to me. It's fourths and fifths, intervals. One night at a local community jam a guitar player picked up a mando and I told him it was upside down guitar thing and he instantly knew how to play it. Chords and leads. My mind does not work like that.

[mandroid]

Bass line , for most folk music is play the 1 or the 5, of the chord right?

melodic instruments like the mandolin cover the 2nd, Mj/min 3rd, 4th, 6th and 7th..

[mandocrucian]

Don't think about "upside down". Think about the notes/sounds you are playing. Start by putting those bass lines you play on bass onto the mandolin; you know how they are supposed to sound. Instead of "learning a new neck" just let your brain/subconscious figure out the fingering "translations" on its own. All those R&B, blues, Ray Price, rock, reggae lines will outline where and how the chordal patterns lay out.

After I was playing left-handed mando (as a sideline) I found that it was much easier to spontaneously play stuff on guitar, even though I really didn't know the neck that well (past the "money frets") . I thought the notes and the hands mysteriously tended to go to them, and find the optimal neck/fingering patterns.

And when I began messing with flute, I just could not look at sheet music and play anything....the paper was to distracting. BUT, if I thought about some simple ingrained tunes (John Fenwick's Flower Amang Them All, Derbyshire Morris, Song of the Ass, Hector The Hero etc., as long as I kept the melody in the forefront of my thought, my fingers adapted to the new fingering patterns. (I would also change the key and do the same drills). I ended up using many of the same teaching exercises I'd developed for beginner mandolin on flute.

Don't learn a second or third instrument "from scratch"; you should graft it onto your primary instrument, as if you were grafting another apple variety on the apple tree in your back yard.

NH

[Randi Gormley]

If you take the advice of those above and think of the mandolin as a separate instrument (sort of like taking up the flute), I'll also suggest you start with something entirely different -- perhaps a different genre of music or a different musical style or technique as a way to reinforce the mandolin's separateness from what you know as a bassist. sometimes a clean break from the familiar will help expand your abilities faster since there's no temptation to take short cuts except those that any veteran musician takes in learning. my 2 cents and worth what you paid for it!

[Doug Goodhill]

Think pinky. If you have been using your pinky with the bass, keep using it on the Mandolin. If you haven't been,well that's too bad. I think you will find patterns that were weird on an instrument tuned in 4ths, suddenly make sense in 5ths. Good luck!

[mandocrucian]

"It's all one big instrument." - Ry Cooder

[chuck3]

Bass line , for most folk music is play the 1 or the 5, of the chord right?

melodic instruments like the mandolin cover the 2nd, Mj/min 3rd, 4th, 6th and 7th..

And, in terms of beats, very commonly the bass plays 1 and 3 while the mando plays 2 and 4. So it's fun to go back and forth between them!

[Borntoplay4strings]

@Doug: On bass I actually use my index and pinky the most! I have heard that when playing mandolin, being able to use all your fingers effectively is important. Hopefully that will be on my side during the transitional learning period, Thanks!