Finding Mandolin

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The Story So Far...

Monday, October 17, 2005

Serendipitous Mandolining (or, How It Begins...)

It started out innocently enough. The wife and I have had it on our to-do list for over a year to visit the Rochester Folk Workshop store in nearby Rochester, Michigan. Last week, on a one-day break from a weeklong homeowner "vacation", we decided to pay them a call.

All in all, our timing was good as we found they were in the process of closing their retail store, devoting their time to full-time teaching. As part of their close-out, they had all of their remaining instruments priced at 50% off.

The instruments were pretty picked over (no pun intended) and there were very few left. However, with a conversation that started: "Here's one we don't already have", we noticed a couple of Oscar Schmidt OM10 mandolins. After a little fiddling with the instrument (again, no pun intended), a long conversation with Karen Sadovsky (one of the owners), and a little rationalizing ("If we hang it on the wall, it's cheaper than art!"), we were the proud owners of a new mandolin.

Now all we needed to do is learn to play. My wife is an accomplished musician, but her background has been in keyboard and harp, and she has little experience with fretted instruments. Me, I'm the technical geek of the family. While I have a passionate love of music, I have little training in actually playing any instrument, other than a few months of piano instruction recently that were cut short when I tore an tendon in the ring finger of my right hand (although not while playing piano - another long story to be told at some point).

Either way, Karen explained to us how to read tabulature, recommended a few books (although she admitted her best method books were already sold out), and threw in a training DVD and some picks. What happened then is the subject matter of this here blog...