Finding Mandolin

Odds and Ends

The Story So Far...

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Road Trip II

During last week's "vacation", I discovered that digging up and re-planting 40+ shrubs in the landscaping was a little more physically demanding than I had hoped. The upside was it gave me an excuse for some extra non-working recovery days that allowed us to explore more of southeast Michigan's musical offerings.

Karen at the Rochester Folk Workshop gave us the name of a guitar store in Ann Arbor that dealt in fretted and folk instruments, and our next trip sent us there to the Herb David Guitar Studio to explore. They had a pretty impressive selection, including some antique mandolins, lutes, ukeleles and even a sitar. (They had plenty of new instruments, too.)

Since our goodies from Rochester included the DVD half of a Mel Bay mandolin instruction set, we picked up the companion method book here. Wifey made some serious evaluation and purchases from their pick offerings (she found some pretty green ones).

Practice continues painfully as I continue to try to build up the callouses on my fingertips. Between the books we've bought and tabs that are available for download on the internet, I've got plenty to choose from.