Mandolin Chord Chart | PDF
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A Mandolin Chord Chart will show you how and where to place your fingers on the strings of the instrument in order to play chords. Strumming chords is an important part of mandolin music. It is also the first thing a new player learns when taking up the instrument.
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How to Use
Our mandolin is an eight-stringed instrument. Each pair of two adjacent strings are spaced very closely together, and on most chord charts, they are effectively referred to as if they were one. From left to right, those pairs of strings are the G, D, A and E strings; in some chord charts, they are referred to as, simply, the 4th, 3rd, 2nd and 1st.
A man practicing his mandolin chords
The neck of the instrument extends from its main body, and it supports the fretboard, or fingerboard, which is what we’re concerned with when we set up to play chords. The neck is capped by the nut, which is a narrow piece of metal that bisects the top of the fretboard, against which all the strings rest.
Looking down from the top of the fretboard, you’ll see a series of raised metal lines also bisecting the fretboard over its width, parallel to the nut. The frets are spaced apart from each other, extending downward towards the body. The fingers of the player’s left hand are used to depresses the string between two those wires just enough to make it impinge on the fret wire directly below it. This changes the tone the string emits when it’s strummed. If you place your finger on the string in the space between the first and second fret, that finger is said to be on the second fret.
Looking at a Mandolin Chord Chart for beginners, we see setups for simple chords that only require you to use two fingers of your left hand. You’ll see what will amounts to a schematic representation of the nut, the four strings, the first of the seven strut wires and, of course seven frets.
The illustration for a D Chord, for example, will show some variation of a circle with a one inscribed over it over the second fret of the G string, and a circle with a two on it over the second fret of the E string. Substitute your index finger for the one, and your middle finger for the two, and now you know how to place the fingers of your left hand to create a D chord.
Its possible to play many different chords with only two fingers, and a beginning Mandolin Chord Chart will show you how to. More advanced charts will show you how to set up for chords that require three and even four fingers. Some will even have you target only one of the strings in a pair.
Mandolin Chord Chart | PDF
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