Which mandolin chords should I teach a young girl?
I was asked, today, to teach a little girl mandolin for a couple of weeks during the summer. When I was being taught (last summer), my teacher taught me simple two-finger chords such as these:
However, it is a bluegrass program and these chords are not conducive to the main mando playing style, "chopping."
Those chords would look more like this:
My question is which chord-type should I teach her? I want her to be better off than I was. Also, I haven't touched my mandolin for nearly a year and the atmospherically high actions renders it nigh unplayable.
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Well, I would suggest telling her both ways, and if she doesn't understand, explain it as "there's more than one way to add up to 5: 2+3=5 , 4+1=5 , etc.".
I learned the A that you learned plays A5, A, Am, and A7. So at first, I would tell her the simple ones, then eventually switch to harder ones. My father copies off another, much more experienced guitar player at my church, but I find it difficult to "copy" off the our pastor on mandolin, but he can tell when I play wrong chords, so it might not be too difficult to see if she actually uses the new chords. I would say yes to the simpler chords first though.
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