Learning the Mandolin?

Mandolins are pretty easy to learn. They are great melody instruments! Once you learn your scales on one, you'll have great fun improvising. Plenty of stuff on youtube about beginning mandolin to get you started too.

Being primarily a melody instrument, you will want to find melodies to play on it. For instance, I tend to play Irish, Scottish, Australian jigs and reels. A lot of people get into playing old time, country or bluegrass tunes with the mandolin, it's a particularly good for that. Or, you might want to just jam with people, and improvise melodies over the top of what they're playing. That's always fun.

I find they're not so great for doing chords with though, so not very good for playing songs with. They can certainly do that, but, because they're such high pitched instruments, they sound very thin and the chords have no warmth or body in them. Some people think they sound cute when used for playing chord accompaniment on songs, though, so it all comes down to taste really.

If playing chords and accompanying songs is what you're interested in though, you could get a ukulele. That too, is an instrument that lacks warmth, but has a beautifully mellow sound which works with a lot of voices. Compared to the mandolin, it's even easier still, and there's plenty of examples of people doing cover songs with ukes on youtube.

Well I played the violin for ten years before picking up the mandolin, and it was super easy because the notes and strings are the same and in basically the same place. So you could learn the violin first but thats pretty hard. I think the ukulele would be would like a mandolin physically, but not musically. So maybe you could just do all 3! But its a cool and really versatile instrument, and probably one of the easiest to play so I say go for it!

And I got my mandolin for like $40 from costco, and a cheap ukulele can be as low as $25 if you get a toy store kind. Violins that are crap will be around $100.

Well guitar and mandolin are very similar instruments, I would say it would be easier to learn guitar because more people do play it, it would be easier to find a teacher. You could teach yourself mandolin sure, you would need books, or information online or something, most people do anyway, I'm not sure but I would guess guitars would be more affordable as well, it all depends on how bad you want to learn, or if you just want to be unique and say you play the mandolin.

i have a mandolin.. picked it up one day and was able to play a few songs...

i also play guitar..

you shouldnt "not want to learn because a lot of people you know play guitar"

guitar is one of the most diverse instruments there are and its more likely to get you into a band etc etc.

but bing a big fan of folk music.. id say mandolin is 100% worth learning

good luck x