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    Mandolin: A Prospector’s Dream

    BySteve Horn

    The mandolin can be soft and delicate or robust and driving. It can be sweet or savory. The mandolin offers color, melodic agility, percussive rhythm to any musical setting. It is a traditional part of many musical genres: classical, Neapolitan, jazz, old time, Bluegrass, Country Western and is found in many other genres as well.

    Learning its potential is the purpose of this blog, to share in the community of players and listeners, of composers and arrangers, band leaders and their audiences.

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    About Chords for the Mandolin

    BySteve Horn

    Mandolin has a pitch range that starts from G below middle C and  spans 3 octaves or more. It’s short string length means a person’s hands can spread over more frets than larger instruments. Moving up the neck, the player will notice a greater ease of reach counteracted by cramped spaces, crowding fingers into miniature shapes to play chords that are easier down low on the neck. This necessitates some change in strategy when playing high up the neck, and generally means that the higher up the neck one chords, the wider the interval spacing becomes. (read more about “Density/Expansivity“.) Although this is true on any stringed instrument, on the mandolin this can be an issue that demands more attention from each individual player depending…

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    Fitting Into the Big Picture

    BySteve Horn

    The mandolin brings a wide range of musical options to the table offering significant rewards for the mandolinist, for the band and for the listener. Its output tends to be focused and punctuating, adding color and character. Of the three basic elements of music, melody, rhythm and harmony, the mandolin tends to lean heavily on melody and on rhythm. Such a spicy concoction offers a lot to the ensemble, yet requires consideration from the band members and the mandolinist as well.

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    Gravity and Levity in Music

    BySteve Horn

    The purpose of this article is to offer food for thought more than to define an element or draw a conclusion and your comments are welcome. This is a discourse in music theory although scientifically very soft. The point is simply to better understand the complex nature of what we hear in music. What is Gravity and Levity in music? Gravity/Levity, or the Gravity/Levity factor (G-L factor), is similar in concept to weight. This article will deal with the concept of Gravity/Levity in terms of harmonic content but other aspects of music can have significant bearing on the G-L factor: timbre, tessiatura, a variety of techniques of orchestration, to name a few. Harmonically speaking, the more gravity a musical element has, the more of a…

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    Jazz Chord Theory

    BySteve Horn

    With a focus on the tetrad as a basic building block for jazz and popular music today, we hope to offer some basic information on chord theory that will enhance and work in conjunction with the rest of this website. An understanding of theory serves to explain in words what we do in music. This gives us a medium on which to communicate the language of music with our language of the spoken word.

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    Where This May Lead

    BySteve Horn

    The internet offers us such a wonderful tool for communications, offering many media sources to experience and to learn from. We are lucky today to have such convenient access to so much information available at our wish and not the wish of someone else. Our wish is to share with you and hope you will share back. We hope you enjoy reading and enjoy learning from the content you find on this website. We also hope you will register and offer your comments. Together we make up a community that is already well established on the web. This site is one facet of that community. What we’re doing here is highly promotional. We want to promote music, jazz and particularly the mandolin and its family…