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Mandolin Fretboard Wizard
Hello Fam,
I’ve been trying to lift the glass ceiling on my guitar playing for decades, and back in 2023 I gave up and decided to try my hand at Mandolin. Thankfully there are local Bluegrass jams and I can play on the 2 and 4 beat pretty well for a beginner. So I did that thing were an instrument gets tough so we switch instruments, and now I’m just getting to the stage where I’m starting to feel like my Mandolin playing is ‘not making progress’ – although this is clearly untrue, it just feels really unmotivating to play. So? Let’s switch instruments back to the guitar! (What could go wrong?)
So now I am focusing on Fretboard Wizard and my plan it to unlock the Fretboard on BOTH instruments at the same time! Luckily the first two lessons focus on single strings – and both instruments are quite similar if you only look at one string at a time – down to the position markers.
I’m looking for advice and commiseration and also to document how this project of double unlocking is going.
Week 1 Day 1 + 2: Both Guitar and Mando have an E string and an A string, so finding the major scale on those strings is exactly the same
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4 Replies
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I bought a Mandolin because I love the sound of it, but I’ve only dabbled a bit in trying to learn. I’m very focused on guitar. I don’t have fretboard wizard, so I’m not much help here.
Mandos are sort of tuned like an upside down guitar G-D-A-E so I imagine that many chord patterns are flipped (those not involving the B and high E string). That’s all I can think of.
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cool idea @RobinGee I gave this some thought. If it were me: I would do the fret wiz just with my guitar first time through. Since the couse is set up using the Guitar as example and explanation understanding the musical principles the understanding may come faster without undue frustration (oh wait, maybe that is just me : ) ). Then when you have grasped the principles it will easily transfer to Mando as you explore new note orders. your knowledge will give you double speed advantage for learning as you only need connect the kinesthetic part of the equation and not the thinking part.
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Thanks for the advice JumpnJeff – I’ll keep an eye out for my frustration and go to your suggestion as a Plan B if it gets un-fun.
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I have been playing Mandolin a lot since we have too many guitarists in our circles and few mandolins. I am still a strummer, but I think the Mando helps a lot with learning the fretboard.
The big help is that the Mando doesn’t have the “B-string bump” complication that standard tuning on the guitar introduces. Thus 7th fret G string is D, 7th on D is E and so on.
Another crutch or bridge has been to think of the mando strings as the mirror of the lower 4 guitar strings. GDAE to EADG..
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