Finding Mandolin

Odds and Ends

The Story So Far...

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Road Trip III

While surfing around the web looking for additional mandolin resources, I came across Elderly Instruments in Lansing, Michigan. Being only about an hour away, and looking for another excuse to avoid digging shrubs, we went out to explore.

What an amazing store! I have never seen so many instruments in one place. Think of it this way: Think about the largest guitar store you've ever seen, and how many guitars they had. Now picture a store that has that kind of a selection in their mandolin offerings alone. I couldn't begin to count the number of guitars they had. Folk, classical, electric - new, used, vintage, antique, and some just plain old. This is not to mention their mandolins, ukeleles, dulcimers, fiddles, accordions and more. One could spend days selecting an instrument - it was truly overwhelming. I did see a $13,000 mandolin and a $38,000 guitar.

Also not to be overlooked was an incredible selection of Folk, Bluegrass and Ethnic CD's, and an amazing stock of music books and DVD's. Alas, as overwhelming as it was, it was difficult to find anything to buy. The spousal unit picked up a couple of CD's, but my find of the day was a pack of Simpson's guitar picks.

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Tuesday, October 18, 2005

How Blue is Your Grass?

It may be only coincidence that I started listening to the Bluegrass channel on Sirius Satellite Radio (after they cancelled Folktown, one of my favorite stations) about the same time I bought a mandolin, or it may be kismet. Either way, having a mando got me in the mood to hear more mando playing, and what better place than bluegrass music? Also, exploring mandolin web sites (some conveniently listed in the sidebar on the left) helped me to learn who are the respected performers of both mandolins and bluegrass music. It's been a great opportunity to explore some terrific music in a genre I hadn't previously followed.

If you're following the same path as I, you should know that the big kahuna of bluegrass mandolin music is the father of bluegrass, Bill Monroe. There are plenty of web sites out there that can tell you more about him than I can. It prompted me to hop onto Rhapsody (forgive my anti-Apple bias) and download a copy of his Anthology album. Great stuff. I think I'm starting to like bluegrass.

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------------------------------------- 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.

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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.

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------------------------------------- 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...