Saturday, November 22, 2008

The Mandolin...coming soon to Jessica's repertoire

So this is the funny story of why I will soon be playing the mandolin. A couple of months ago during a 40 day period I’d set aside to seek the Lord, I had the idea that a fun adventure when I come home on furlough would be to take up the mandolin. I confess I know virtually nothing about this instrument but the key factor was that I knew my brother had one. My mom had the inspiration to give him one for Christmas a few years back, but I’m not sure its strings have ever been plucked. I emailed my mom and she got Casey to locate his mandolin, and he went and pulled it out of the warehouse for me.

I don’t know the first thing about mandolin-playing so I also asked my mom to find me a teacher. Where do you go to take mandolin lessons? My mom just happens to be in the middle of working on a music project with a young man, and she was like, “Hey, he plays a lot of instruments, I’ll ask him.” Sure enough, he teaches mandolin! What are the odds? So I don’t know where this experience is going to lead me, probably not to Carnegie Hall, but I think it will be fun and who knows, maybe I’ll find a new passion and a way to express myself! It would be cool if I could use it to lead worship or to play with my Congolese musician friends. Yeehaw!

2 comments:

jeff said...

There is a guy out in Stayton who used to run a music and instrument repair shop - seems to be really into mandolins, bluegrass, that sort of thing. He also runs a very local radio station that the company I work for rebroadcasts over the internet - http://kencradio.com (use Internet Explorer if you can). You'll find his e-mail address on the About page.

He might have some suggestions when it comes to maintenance, training and similar...

angi said...

I had a friend that decided to learn the mandolin because it's nice and small and easily portable for missions trips, so that seems very applicable for you also.