Hey all... I was recently given a mandolin, which I have no clue how to play, but I'm excited about learning. I'm hoping that there might be one or two mandolin players out there who can point me in a direction to learning how to play Irish/Scottish/Welsh trad on it... I tend to need sheet music to get me started, especially when learning a new instrument. Would sheet music with guitar chords work, or are the chords really different for mandolin? You can tell I'm a total newbie to stringed instruments, eh? I'm just stoked that I learned to play a C-scale on it yesterday!
I've found a couple of nice sites to get me started with some basic lessons (folkofthewood.com and mandolincafe.com). Are there any other places I should be looking?
Although they might be lurking on this forum, a better forum to ask this question of string players is on the Trad Music forum at the bottom of the index page. But, the mandolin is tuned the same way that a violin is...so guitar chords will not work. As far as tune books go, any tune book for fiddle or whistle or flute should provide you with tunes-a-plenty.
The mandolin is tuned in fifths like a violin but unlike a guitar which is tuned in fourths. A quick and dirty way to find chords for mandolin if you already play guitar is to notice that the tuning G, D, A, E from lowest to highest courses is the same as the bottom four strings of a guitar but in reverse. If you just write out the fingering you would play on the bottom four strings for guitar chords in reverse you will get the same chords on mando, rather differently voiced of course.
Mando is terrific. Since it's tuned the same as a fiddle, it will give you a head start should you ever decide to take up that instrument. Just about all trad tunes only need first position, so that's all I have bothered to learn (so far). I always take mine to sessions since there are usually a lot of whistle players there, but few mandolins. Switching off from time to time is fun too.
Now I don't play mandolin myself, but my friend's mum just started to, and she was gave us a nice show & tell about how she was learning to play. She used to be a violin player 'til health/aging probs made that too hard to do anymore, then recently she heard that mandolins were tuned like violins so she went right out and bought herself one.
She showed us her mandolin sheet music with tablature, including a complete O'Carolan book, & demonstrated to a bunch of us string-instrument-ignorami how it worked. We were all quite taken with how sensible it seemed. I was sufficiently impressed with the whole concept that I subsequently tried googling on "mandolin tablature" and out popped a plethora free mandolin tablature websites. So you should be able to find what you need, either in a music store or online
I also did some other exploring on my friend's mum's behalf, and discovered that the shareware program Melody Assistant (available for both Windows & Mac) can convert ABC files into tablature for any string-thing from guitar to lute to mandolin. I tried doing it to a few ABC files to make sure it was easy enough not to stress out a non-geeky mom-type person, and indeed it's just a matter of choosing "Tablature" from a menu, finding "mandolin" in the long list of stringed instruments in the dialog box that appears, then clicking the "do it" button. Going from my experience with ABC and whistles, I expect one might sometimes want to use the program transpose the music to a more compatible key for the instrument in question, but that's also a quick menu & dialog box interaction.
caniadafallon wrote:I'm just stoked that I learned to play a C-scale on it yesterday!
Learn G and D scales and you'll be on your way, at least as far as playing trad is concerned. Definitely hang out on the message board at Mandolin Cafe -- there is a separate Celtoid board with several luminaries like Robin Bullock, Paul Kotapish and Dan Beimborn. Very friendly group with a lot of knowledge. Watch out for MAS, though (Mandolin Acquisition Syndrome, the mandolin version of WhOA) ... it gets expensive.
I'm hoping that there might be one or two mandolin players out there who can point me in a direction to learning how to play Irish/Scottish/Welsh trad on it... I tend to need sheet music to get me started, especially when learning a new instrument. Would sheet music with guitar chords work, or are the chords really different for mandolin? You can tell I'm a total newbie to stringed instruments, eh? I'm just stoked that I learned to play a C-scale on it yesterday! 
