Not that long ago, I decided to take the plunge and buy a mandolin. Besides having an itchy online-shopping trigger finger, my main reason for doing so was because I’d long since peaked at the “Excruciatingly Boring” stage of guitar playing, and instead of wanting to put in the blood, sweat, and tears needed to actually get any better, I was hoping I might somehow be a virtuoso at a different instrument. (Hey, don’t judge! It’s the American dream of laziness! Heck, if the mandolin doesn’t work out, I just might purchase a trombone and see what happens!)
Now, some of you might be asking, “Just what in the heck is a mandolin?” Well, that’s a very good question, and my answer is that it’s a small, stringed instrument in the lute family that’s usually associated with bluegrass music and which looks like something you’d give to a child because a guitar is too big for them. (“There, there, Timmy, why don’t you try this one out? It’s just your size!!”) And if that isn’t a good enough description for you, I recommend you do an image search, at which point you’ll probably say, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen people play those things before, standing way in the back of the band! Who makes them, anyway? Fisher-Price?”
Dispute its diminutive stature, however, don’t sleep on the mandolin. It may be small, but Ricky “Highway 40 Blues” Skaggs plays one, along with Marty “A Bunch of Good Songs You Never Remember Off the Top of Your Head” Stuart. Heck, even Waylon “I’m Cooler Than You No Matter Who You Are” Jennings was known to pull one out on occasion, most notably on an episode of the “Dukes of Hazzard.” (It’s a great scene, by the way. Besides the mandolin magically appearing and disappearing on his person throughout the song, he’s standing by himself on the stage, yet somehow being backed by an entire band. My current theory is that they're up on the roof. Check it out!)
Now, what makes the mandolin interesting is that it has, and I’m quoting Wikipedia here, “four courses of doubled metal strings tuned in unison, thus giving it a total of eight strings.” In other words, it’s sort of like a four-stringed instrument, except each string is really two strings tuned exactly the same and set super-close to one-another. So, in order to sound a note, you have to mash down on two strings at once. This, in turn, will quickly bludgeon your fingers into a painful mush, which is the exact state they’ll remain in for the first several decades of you playing the instrument. After that, however, you’ll probably develop helpful calluses to make things easier, just in time for the arthritis to set in.
Another interesting thing about the mandolin is that since it’s so short, the strings produce a higher pitch than a guitar, which results in it being much easier to be terrible at than it’s six-stringed cousin. In short, when you screw up on the mandolin, everybody hears it, including possibly most of the next county. (This holds true even if you’re playing with 14 acoustic guitars, a drum set, and that one annoying guy who thinks he’s all that on the electric guitar.)
Still, the mandolin is cool, and for good reason. First off, since it’s so small, it’s incredibly portable, and you can easily just toss it into your car if you’re heading off to a jam. (Just ask any upright bass player how handy that would be!) Sometimes, admittedly, it does get lost between the seats along with your phone, but the tradeoff for its portability still makes it worth it. Second, Steve Earle wrote “Copperhead Road” on a mandolin, so that automatically makes it a cool instrument. Heck, now that I think of it, I really don’t need to present any more arguments as to its inherent coolness; the Steve Earle fact alone pretty much seals the deal.
Moving along, the reason I decided to write this essay isn’t so I could talk up the fact that I have – and can awkwardly strum – a mandolin. Instead, it’s so you can become more aware of the instrument and start to recognize it while watching and listening to music. In my humble opinion, it’s quite underappreciated in the grand scale of things, and I think it deserves a little more respect.
Anyway, that concludes today’s lesson on the mandolin. However, join me next week when we’ll continue with our series “Instruments I’m Horrible At Playing.” I’ll be doing a deep dive into that time in sixth-grade when I had to try and learn to play the {shudder} recorder, cumulating in my first ever solo performance, a truly memorable rendition of “Friends Are Neat.” You won’t want to miss it!
