Mandolin Open Position Tips

Series Summary

The mandolin belongs to the guitar family of musical instruments. Considerably smaller, the mandolin has eight strings which are paired together in four courses that are strummed or plucked to produce sound. Mandolins are typically tuned the same as a violin, but can be tuned to produce the same fretting patterns as the standard guitar. Believed to have derived from Italian culture, the Mandolin is used in a variety of music genres, including bluegrass, country and western, folk and rock and roll. Even Greek and Indian cultures have incorporated the Mandolin into Kantades and Carnatic music. In this free video series, our expert Levin Schwartz will teach you everything you need to know about scales and finger patterns on the mandolin. He will tell you how to play scales with finger patterns starting with the first, second, third and fourth fingers. He'll show you those same patterns in high and low octaves, and show you how to move those patterns around. He'll even give you some scale exercises you can do to improve your chops, including a sequential pattern, a pattern of thirds and a triad exercise.

Video Transcript

"So, last session we talked about major scales, and the seven notes of the scale, and it's the building blocks of all of our concepts, that are involved in our improvisation. At least that's how I think about it, and so what we're going to do in this session, is look at more of the open positions. Things that are more inclined to practicing on the mandolin. A lot of the open positions, work with the open strings. You start to get a lot of ringing and overtones with it ,so we're going to transpose a lot of those ideas to the open positions, but we're also going to talk about how to play what you call a pentatonic scale, using not all the notes of the major scale, so the major scale becomes the building blocks, in which we then kind of deviate and look at other types of playing, and other types of scale positions. Other types of music, use different types of things. That's a minor scale, found within the major scale, so yes, that's what we'll look at."