Mandolin from Scratch

What every beginning mandolin aspirant should know to get up and playing as soon as possible, whether you are interested in bluegrass, old-time or Celtic styles, or want to get into the blues. Of course, we start by showing you how to tune the thing, and move right along to learning how to strum some simple chords, G, C and D. There are twelve different keys in music, but we only care about five of them (G, D, A, C and E), so we'll learn how to play the most important chords to these, using plenty of familiar song examples. Bluegrassers will see how to play the all-important Chop Chord, as well as other chord forms around the neck.Next comes single-string playing, arguably the most important thing you can do on a mandolin. You'll get some practice with simple tunes and scales, and then we move on to the heart of the book: playing classic fiddle tunes in the North American and European traditions. I'll give you two versions for most of these, a Plainer one and a Fancier one. After that comes some chord-melody playing, where we'll apply chords and harmonies to some popular folk and classical pieces.