whyd you start?

[Jim MacDaniel]

whyd you start?

That's easy: Iain Macleod's work with the first incarnation of Shoolgenifty: as soon as I heard A Whisky Kiss, I went out and bought the CD, and had my first mandolin soon after.

Here is a 2007 vid of Iain playing Bjork's Chauffer, a cut off of one of the Shoogles' later CD's...

[Jason Kindall]

I'm just another Grisman with the Grateful Dead inductee to the mandolin world. I actually didn't even like bluegrass until later on.

Traditional bluegrass is growing on me, but I'm still a Dawg and newgrass man.

Grisman's sound and the palpable feel of his music (and then Sam Bush) really spoke to me. I was a long-time electric guitar player. I loved the more organic electric sounds which made the transition back to acoustic music easy, but I had a hard time getting personally jazzed about acoustic guitar. Enter Dawg and his tremendous tone on mandolin. I flirted with the idea for several years (WHY DID I WAIT?!?) and finally sold a few toys and called up Jeff Cowherd and got a Bovier headed my way.

I've been blissfully fired up and playing that mandolin for a year now.

I'm finding that inspiration equates to finding melodies and sounds more easily on the mando for me than it ever did on guitar. Sometimes it takes 17 or 18 years to figure out what you should have been playing all along.

[Rick Schmidlin]

Loved Ripple in 71 when I was 17, many years later a 2 year old girl in 71 turned of age, she was sitting with me and heard Ricky and Ronnie at the Greek Theatre in Grifith Park L.A. in the front row say I love that music.I bought her an MF5 when she got her PhD at UCLA. She never played it, so I did for six years every day.

[Steve Perry]

I played guitar for years but there are too many guitar players.

Same here... The trouble is that all the other guitar players had the same idea. Now at a jam there's just as many mandolins as guitars. More often than not, I'll wind up playing more guitar than mando.

[zombywoof]

Really not so much starting as much as getting interested in and goofing around but what set me on the path was seeing Carl Martin and Howard Armstrong play back in the 1970s. In their set was some blues mandolin. Not that modern, santitized kind of playing that is all form and technique but playing with soul. Incredible stuff.

[mculliton123]

Played guitar for 50 years or so and noodled around with a mountain dulcimer my wife bought in Pidgen Forge on our honeymoon in 1976. Then i inherited an old beat-up ukulele, took it in for repairs and discovered it wasn't a uke after all but a 1925 Martin Tiple. huh?? so whilst repairs are being done got a uke just to learn the chords , ya know how it goes, after all they're tuned and played the same. Next thing i know i'm on e-Bay bidding on a bowl-back, got a banjo-mando ar a local pawn shop which i'm rebuilding and now awaiting delivery of an eastman 905D. It's like i got hit by a bus.
My instrument index now excedes my BBQ grill index by a ratio of 13:5

[John Kinn]

Had played guitar (folk,rock) for twenty years when I got to know some people who were into bluegrass. They needed a mandolin player, so I got Baldassari on Homespun and then an old Gibby A40. The bluegrass band is history, but MAS stays with me..

[Charlieshafer]

Played the sax for years in post-bop jazz bands. When people ask what you play, and you tell them, they quickly look away and try to find someone else to talk to. Switched to button box to play Irish and Old-time. Same problem.. "accordion, huh... umm.. that's nice." Then the quick run for the door. Took up mandolin to accompany the rest of the family, all fiddlers, and figured that would be great as it's the same tuning. The kids love stealing the mandolin from time to time also. Now I need a mandocello to really fill the bottom end in.

[Mark Gibbs]

It was 1976 and i heard The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's WILL THE CIRLCE BE UNBROKEN on vinyl. Now I'm not talking about vol. 2 or 3 either as they stink. I was hooked and a friend had a loaner mandolin. When i commit to something i latch on like a Bull Terrier don't look back. And then there was Jack Tottle's Bluegrass Mandolin instruction book that i still have although i don't have the tear out vinyl record that came with it. After a short time the loaner mando was given back and replaced with a not so great sounding 50's Gibson A-5 that i bought at Norm's Rare Guitars in So Ca. Probably needed a setup. And then to my prized Givens F-5 that i still have today. Wouldn't sell it for less than 5 figures. . Some friends of mind had a Bluegrass gospel band that i joined so i was in a working band, I could play some cords. We would go play a churches and they would pass the hat for a donation and we made some real money or at least enough to go out to lunch with the women folk. All this happened in a period of less than 3 months.

[Rick Schmidlin]

It was 1976 and i heard The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's WILL THE CIRLCE BE UNBROKEN on vinyl. Now I'm not talking about vol. 2 or 3 either as they stink.

Agreed

[abuteague]

When asked at college what I was going to do for my summer I said I was going to "play a high pitched instrument near a large body of water, except I haven't nailed down the details yet." The person I said this to said, "how about mandolin?" I said sure, that would work, though I wasn't all to sure what a mandolin was. Anyway, she gave me a mandolin from her closet that she inherited from a music teacher who passed away. It was a gift.

[Jill McAuley]

Back in the summer of '07 I was initially bitten by the mandolin bug after playing one in a Dublin music shop, just passing the time while waiting for a serially late friend. But despite obsessing and finally getting one, I neglected it due to focusing more on the tenor banjo, which I'd started playing simultaneously. Fast forward to summer '08 and I'd moved to the States and found myself living in an apartment, having to contend with neighbors who didn't think the tenor banjo rocked as much as I did. So one afternoon I wandered into a local music shop and picked up a tatty old Harmony mandolin for cheap, intending to give it to a pal for a birthday present, and with the birthday 3 weeks away, I thought the wee mandolin would be handy to have around in the meantime, so I wouldn't get rusty and forget all the tunes I knew on the banjo. I ended up having so much fun playing it that it ended up being a belated birthday present, because I couldn't bear to part with it until I'd managed to buy a mandolin to call my own. It was this time last year that a wee Flatiron 2M pancake arrived on my doorstep and I haven't looked back since then - the Flatiron has come and gone, as has a Weber Aspen #2, but I now live with four mandolins, while the poor oul banjo is tucked up in it's case under the coffee table, feeling a wee bit neglected.

Cheers,
Jill

[Tim Bowen]

Not sure if we're talking mandolin or music in general.

As to the latter, my story reads like a cliche'. I saw The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show in the 60's as a wee pup living in Frankfurt, Germany, and that was it, I was hooked. I've been barking down the road to ruin ever since.

[JeffD]

"Mandolin I've been playing since I was 14. Oh music, no I didn't play any music till I was 21".

[Hayes Griffin]

I played guitar for years but there are too many guitar players.

Hear, Hear! My Tony Rice licks weren't as good as everybody else's, so I started working on my Grisman licks...

[bmac]

Health issues....
I had played guitar in the ' 70s but by the mid '70s was too busy raising family and trying to start a business. Seven years ago I had a life threatening stroke which left me legally blind and with very little sense of balance when walking, standing, etc. In addition I lost big chunks of memory and the ability to remember numbers.
Since I was essentially blind I decided to become "the blind blues mandolin guy." I knew I had an excellent ear and a long time interest in blues. Since I was never any good at reading music I figured I could function pretty well playing by ear. The mandolin was chosen so that if I tipped over I probably could spare the mandolins' destruction whereas a guitar was much more likely to be smashed in the fall. Gradually my balance improved to normalcy and by then I had grown to enjoy the mandolin as a blues instrument. So what started as a theraputic involvement on my part became an obcession. I play three hours per day and when I am not playing I am ususally restoring mandolins and recently old mandolin banjos.

So through the mandolin and the blues I have pretty much given myself a new start and a passion. I am now more focused and probably more productive than anytime in my life.

[Mike Scott]

This a long and boring (probably to most of you) story. I had been playing guitar for about 10 years. My mother was in the early stages of a fast progressing type of dimentia (sic?) and one day said to me that she found it interesting that I played the guitar because her father had played the mandolin. I adored my grandfather and tucked that comment away. After she died, I asked my guitar teacher if he knew where I could get a mandolin. I went on down to the store owned by a friend of his and traded my Larrivee P09 and some $$$ on a KM 1000. I had never even touched a mandolin prior to that and had the store owner play the two he had that were more expensive than the trade in because I had no idea what I was doing. So, I took it up as sort of a nod to my grandfather.

Since then I have asked others in the family if they ever saw my grandfather play the mandolin or if they had seen one around his house. No one has, so now I don't really know if my mother was not really coherent at the time or what. It doesn't really matter, because I enjoy playing it anyway.

Like I said long and boring!!!

[Susan H.]

I love the mandolin and how it sounds. A very versitile instrument. When Chris Thille, or Mike Compton, Ricky Skaggs and others play it's poetry to me! farmerjones said, sometimes it's not about the guitar, fiddle or b@njer, it is SOMETIMES all about the mandolin! My only regret is that I took it up long ago and not just a couple of years ago. Oh the time I wasted...

[Jason Kindall]

Health issues....
I had played guitar in the ' 70s but by the mid '70s was too busy raising family and trying to start a business. Seven years ago I had a life threatening stroke which left me legally blind and with very little sense of balance when walking, standing, etc. In addition I lost big chunks of memory and the ability to remember numbers.
Since I was essentially blind I decided to become "the blind blues mandolin guy." I knew I had an excellent ear and a long time interest in blues. Since I was never any good at reading music I figured I could function pretty well playing by ear. The mandolin was chosen so that if I tipped over I probably could spare the mandolins' destruction whereas a guitar was much more likely to be smashed in the fall. Gradually my balance improved to normalcy and by then I had grown to enjoy the mandolin as a blues instrument. So what started as a theraputic involvement on my part became an obcession. I play three hours per day and when I am not playing I am ususally restoring mandolins and recently old mandolin banjos.

So through the mandolin and the blues I have pretty much given myself a new start and a passion. I am now more focused and probably more productive than anytime in my life.

Cool story.

[Sleepy]

My Grandpa, he played fiddle, Mando and guitar. I started on the guitar and found out my hands were too small and made the move to the mando.
Oh yaeh and some records of some guy named Big Mon

[Earl Gamage]

tremolo

[mandolirius]

tremelo

tremolo (sorry, bit of a pet peeve, especially around here)

[Earl Gamage]

I'm smiling. I used to be able to spell but it's not a priority anymore for some reason.

[Canister]

I was trying to play the banjo and guitar by myself. My friend, who seems to be able to play anything with strings by ear, showed up with a mandolin. He said he would work with me while he learned. It's been fun but I can't keep up with him. Some how I think he had a big head start he didn't admit to.

[Rogapesh]

I've played guitar off and on for years. A couple of months ago, a friend handed me her mandolin and said, "here, try this." She gave me her started mandolin and I started taking lessons. That was all it took.