Chords for Mandolin Chords: Find ANY Major Chord on Your Mandolin!

Bum-ba-da-dum!
Hey y'all, let's learn some mandolin rhythm today, and I've got a free download for you, too.
Chord chart and another quick guide [N] for how to find chords in various keys.
I'll tell you how to get that here in just a moment, but I just finished like a 45 minute lesson on
mandolin rhythm.
Dealing particularly with what I call the closed position number one, and that's just this big old fat [D] four-finger chop.
You hear it, you see it all the time.
It's one of the most traditional [G] chord positions that we find on the mandolin.
And what's cool about it is that you can find every major key on the mandolin neck using that one position and
_ one variation, and that's what I want to explain to you.
First, let me just show you how to play it.
It's a little awkward to play at first, but
you will get it, and you can just search videos of like little kids playing mandolin,
and you'll see that they can do it.
So I know you can do it.
It just takes a little work, but I'm going to start with my middle finger on the third fret,
my index finger on the second fret, my ring finger on the fifth, and
my pinky on the seventh.
And this happens to be a G chord.
Now, mechanically, how do we play that [N] chord?
Well, we're gonna let the mandolin rest at the base of my index finger there,
and then I'm going to curl my fingers around where it looks like my fingernails are pointed toward my right shoulder.
I don't want to point them toward the ceiling.
We'll never get that shape.
But if we let our hand kind of roll and cant this way, we can get it with a little work.
If you can't get your pinky right off the bat, that's okay.
Keep working on it, and then our thumb's just going to lightly fall over the [G] top of the neck.
This happens to be a G chord, [D] and that's what I want to talk about.
How do I know this is a G chord?
I know it's a G chord because two of my fingers are playing a G note,
which is the root of the chord, and those fingers are my middle finger and my ring finger.
So whenever I make that shape, no matter where I am on the mandolin,
whatever notes that my middle finger and ring finger are playing, that's the chord that I'm playing.
All right, keep that in mind.
So if I'm playing it here, this is a G note,
this is a G note.
They're one octave apart.
You can hear it.
[G] So when I do that shape,
I'm playing a G chord.
That means as long as we know where our notes are roughly, or we can figure them out,
we can play whatever chord we want.
For instance, if we were to move it up two frets,
where would my [E] middle finger be?
It would [A] be on an A note.
Guess what chord this is?
[G] It's an A chord.
So we could just walk it right up the mandolin.
We could strong [A] G, walk up to the A,
we could do [Bb] B flat,
_ [C] B, C, and once we get up to C with this particular chord [Ab] pattern, it gets pretty cramped.
Not only that, we run into a lot of overtones in our mandolin, and we lose a lot of the
chop sound that we want to get once we get up super high.
So what we're going to do is we're going to use a variation of
this same pattern to get the rest of our chords.
[G] Now, how do we do that?
Well, let's go back down to G, _ and let's
use [N] this chord shape to get a C chord
using only three fingers.
How am I going to do that?
Well, I want you to take your chord shape, and I want you to move everything up one string toward the ceiling,
this way.
So if I take that same shape, and I move everything up, here's what it looks like.
Now, what happens to my pinky?
My pinky runs out of strings to play.
That's okay.
So your pinky gets a rest, and we're just playing three fingers on the bottom three strings,
now the same rule [C] applies.
Wherever my middle finger and my ring finger are, that's the chord that I'm playing.
So this three string chord now is a
C chord, because I've got a C note there and a C note there.
And that's the cool thing about mandolin tuning, right?
Is that we have [E] equidistant intervals between all the strings.
So whenever I move toward the ceiling on a mandolin,
I move a fourth interval.
[Bm] Okay, so G, move it up, G, A, B, C.
We go up [C] fourth.
There's a C chord.
That's cool, because a while ago, we found a C chord way up here, so we can find another one right here.
Both are C chords. _
Which means we can keep moving up the neck.
Let's do that.
Here's C.
We can move [D] up to a D.
[E] We can go up to an E.
We can [Dm] play an F.
[G] We can even go all the way up,
and get another G chord.
That's pretty cool.
But again, we're starting to run out of real estate there,
so that's where we could start back over down here. _
So [C] what we've done is we've taken one chord position, this
closed major position number one, I call it, and we went from G to G.
We went up the neck in a four-finger variation, came back down, started over with the three-finger variation,
carried it all the way up to G.
That's pretty cool, huh?
So now you can find any major chord that you want to on the mandolin using this particular position.
There are other positions, of course, but this is a good one, [G] particularly
_ [N] whenever you're wanting to get that good bluegrass chop sound.
Now, about the downloads.
I've got all those chords I just showed you on a chord chart.
You can check it out in the Most Common Bluegrass Keys.
And then I also have a 1-4-5 Quick Guide.
That's just a quick guide to know how to find your 1-4-5 chords,
no matter what key that you're in.
Both of those are located on my forum for free.
Just follow the link.
It's either here in this video or in the description.
Go check that out.
But while you're there,
you want to check out that
rhythm lesson that I just taught.
You'll find that link here, too, because it's like a 45-minute lesson,
not only teaching what we just did in more depth, but how the formula works to play songs.
So if we're playing a song in G, it's got a 1-4-5 chord.
How can I quickly move back and forth between those 1-4-5s using the patterns that we just learned?
I think you'll really dig it.
Go get those downloads.
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Have a great day.
Play [G] those chops!
[N] _