Start on the A string (closest to the B string your guitar piece starts on). B-C#-E-F#-E-F# Then take a peek at the notes on a mandolin. If you check out the guitar neck at a site like this, you can convert the frets to notes. Take the first six notes of the guitar tab: -0-2-5-7-5-7 (all on the B string). Posted by Banky_Edwards at 8:02 PM on April 3
Once you're happily plucking out your tune, you can start thinking about learning chords and scales. It won't be easy, but you should learn a bit about the notes on your mandolin. Then look at a map of the notes on the mandolin neck, and mark off the equivalent notes, converting *that* into tab. I imagine the best way to do this is to compare the guitar tab to a diagram of the notes on the guitar frets. (I read music and play several instruments, but the first thing I did when I got my new banjo was pull up some banjo tab so I could start hacking away!) ijoshua has the best advice so far - you'll have to convert the tab yourself. You just want to try and pluck out this tune on your new instrument. People advising you to just learn the music, or figure it out by ear, are of course offering good advice, but I know that's not what you're looking for. Thus, if you tried to "auto convert" a guitar tab you could well end up with fingerings that at best don't make sense, and at worse are impossible to play, on the mandolin.
As others have explained here, the difference in tunings between guitar and mando means that there are different intervals between strings. It *seems* like there should be some easy way to convert between tabs (every note on the guitar has a similar note on the mandolin, more or less), but the problem is that fret x on the guitar does not equal fret x on the mando. I don't have either my guitar or mandolin in front of me. I’ll see if I can translate the first few phrases of your linked song: To play a guitar melody on a mandolin, you can just play the same note values. On the mandolin, the notes are in ascending order as A D A F. However, if you have a chord chart for the mandolin, you should be able to just play chord of the same “name” on either the guitar or the mandolin.īecause the mandolin’s strings are tuned in ascending 5 ths and the guitar’s are tuned in ascending 4 ths, you’ll probably end up playing a different inversion of the chord, meaning that the intervals of the notes in the chord will be arranged differently.Įxample: on the guitar, the notes in a major D chord, in ascending order, are D A D F. The mandolin generally occupies a different role in harmony than the guitar.