Hi! My name is Norm. I live in Iowa. I'm retired....sort of. What I do to stay busy is I've turned my lifelong hobby of repairing, modding, building, and tinkering on guitars into a nice little business that I do out of my home shop. I work on all sorts of stringed instruments, mandolins included. I've even restored a couple of antique mandolins.
I own a mandolin.... well, more of a mandolin-shaped-object I picked up at a yard sale. In retrospect, having it has probably been more of a deterrent to learning mandolin than not having one at all, because it was just so uninspiring to play.
So my New Year's resolution this year is to learn to play the mandolin! Of course I'll need a better mandolin! I thought of building one, and I might do that someday, but time is of the essence with New Year's resolutions you know, so I set out in search of one. I seriously overextended my musical instrument budget with the purchase of a couple guitars a few months ago, so I settled on a used Kentucky KM-140S. It came today... needed a bit of fret work, a bit of adjustment, and new strings, but I'm very pleased with it. For a budget instrument I think it sounds quite good.
So now the task of adjusting to the tiny neck and goofy tuning. I made an amazing discovery some time ago that a mandolin is tuned like an upside-down guitar. So I immediately went from zero to being able to strum a few chords as if I really knew how to play! So now I'm working on scales and so far I've learned Mandolin Wind and Copperhead Road. I probably won't be doing too much bluegrass. I like bluegrass music, but a little goes a long way for me.
It seems that there aren't nearly the on-line resources for mandolin as there for guitar... things like tablature, how to play youtubes, and such. If any of you can point me to any resources that could benefit an old guy guitar player who wants to learn mandolin, I'd be much obliged.
So there you have it... that's me. I'm glad to be here. Like what I see. Seems like a lot of great folks with a lot of knowledge and experience.
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