Mandolin Music Theory 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 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

"Hi. So what we've done this last couple of series is look at major scales and pentatonic scales and altering notes and whatnot. We're going to put that as a little capstone in this whole series. Everything we're going to do is going to look at a major scale and altering notes or omitting notes or adding notes to that, and a lot of what we're going to do first is just look at pentatonic scales. Pentatonic once again is the one, two, three, five and six of the major scale. So if we're in the key of G - one, two, three, five, six or My Girl. Things we've looked at before. We're going to go around and play these mostly in the key of G - one, four, five meaning the three major chords in the key of G which are G, C and D. So C major pentatonic, you know and D. Back to G."