Luke Said To Tell You About My Mandolin

At the end of yesterday’s Aftermath staff meeting, as we all said the things we were going to do afterwards–primarily having breakfast or dinner, depending on our timezones–I said I was excited to go play my new mandolin. Luke asked what a mandolin was, and as I revved up for my eager answer, he said to put it in a blog instead. So here we are.

I bought a mandolin! What is a mandolin? For starters, confusingly, it’s not a food slicer. Instead, it’s like if someone made a ukulele out of two violins. It’s a small instrument that for some reason has a copy of each of its four strings, for a total of eight strings you have to tediously tune and then somehow play together.

You’ll remember that I took up the ukulele in February, after years of sucking at the guitar. I love the ukulele, whose size and approachability have opened up a world of cool new music styles and things for me to learn. The ukulele has a bit of a reputation for being a simple or limited instrument, though many virtuosic players have proven that untrue. While the things I haven’t learned how to do on the ukulele yet will last me the rest of my life, I did work my way to its edges by accident, by getting into bluegrass and Irish music on it.

The ukulele isn’t a common instrument in those styles, and while there are lots of people arranging for them, it’s not quite up to the task. I went to some Irish and bluegrass jams, or group playing sessions, and while they were tolerant and even welcoming of me and my ukes, it was a bit of a forced fit. To play some of the cool tunes I heard, I’d either have to transpose their keys–which would mean I couldn’t play what everyone else was playing–or move around the fretboard in a way that became challenging and impractical. This is totally doable–there was a very talented banjo uke player at the bluegrass jam–but I started thinking how nice it would be to play an instrument that was more, well, normal. (Well, “normal.”)

So enter the mandolin: small enough to still have some of the qualities I love in the ukulele, but an instrument that suits the kind of music I’m excited to play better. It’s also an instrument my actual musician friends don’t wrinkle their noses at. After months of researching “best beginner mandolin” like a scammy SEO site’s dream, and after biting the bullet on ordering an instrument online, I spent all of yesterday staring out the window for the FedEx truck until my mandolin arrived.

There are already some, let’s call them, challenges. For one, since you have to play with a pick, it is very loud. This is bad because jesus christ I am awful at it. While I was immediately able to play the ukulele, given its light strings and basic similarity to the guitar, the mandolin is just familiar enough to make me feel like I should be able to play it while being different enough that I can’t play it at all. Its design makes its weight weird and the instrument hard to hold. The fretboard is hella tiny even for my tiny hands, making it easy to hit the wrong notes and challenging to move between strings. Pressing two strings at once simply should not be a thing a person has to do. My goal last night was “make the right noise come out,” a goal I did not accomplish by the time I forced myself to put it away to not torture my neighbors. I’ve watched some people’s mandolin progress videos on YouTube and will admit to thinking “that’s really how you sound after four months of playing?” but oh no I get it now. This thing is tough.

This is all fine and normal and what learning an instrument is, especially when I’ve only had it for a few hours, but it’s definitely going to take a lot of practice to get to a point where I can even think about playing actual songs on it. It’s humbling to be so thoroughly bested, but also kind of nice: I can just worry about the very basics for now, knowing that once I have them down, there’s an exciting new world of music to explore. I am determined to never use tablature on the mandolin, figuring out how to map my music-reading ability to a fretted instrument so I can use the wealth of sheet music out there instead of constantly googling “[song name]+tab.” And I’d like to focus on my scales and ear-training so I can actually play at the jams the way other people do.

So to answer Luke’s question of “what is a mandolin,” it is a bad but exciting choice I have made that hopefully neither I nor my neighbors will come to regret. It is another addition to the corner of my small apartment I call “the ukulele chair,” which is where I keep all my instruments and music. It is very pretty to look at and, so far, distinctly un-pretty to play. Once I’m better at it, hopefully it will be an excuse to get out of the house and meet new people. If you have tips for how I can stop sucking at it as quickly as possible, please let me know.