Finding Mandolin

Odds and Ends

The Story So Far...

Monday, October 17, 2005

And the Geeks Shall Rise....

So here's the interesting thing: When I had mandolin tabs explained to me, a light came on. With about a minute of instruction, I understood how to convert ink to music better than years of (admittedly unstructured) studying standard musical notation ever could. (Pattern recognition? Mathematics?) As soon as I got our mandolin home, I was able to start picking out simple tunes from the songbooks we bought. Sure, it was slow, awkward and painful (I don't have any callouses built up on my fingertips yet), but by God I was playing music!

And here's the kicker: the musical missus has so many years of standard notation drilled into her, tabs are a foreign language she's having trouble grokking. It's the first time I've ever had the upper hand on an instrument.