Which one do you play more??

I practice more on my acoustic, but for sheer pleasure, I play more on my electrics. I also have to fit in time for mandolin and bass. So, it's probably 30% acoustic, 40% electric, 20% mandolin and 10% bass. Approximately! :D

I just got a mandolin a few months ago :D I have a hard time playing chords whith my thick fingers :lol: Also I just got a banjo from santa, learning to play country blues on that :D

Cool! I've always loved the sound of a mandolin! Never really expected to own one, though. But, my sister bought this one for me XMas 2004 and I love it! I find myself leaning toward old bluegrass stuff and old-timey gospel when I pick it up (Will The Circle Be Unbroken, etc....) One thing I find cool about it is that I can cover 6 frets on the mandolin and only 4 on the guitar!!! I realize the spacing is way different, but I like being able to say that I can cover 6 frets! So, between us we've got the guitar, mandolin and banjo........ all we'd need now is a fiddle player and maybe a dulcimer and we could be a bluegrass band!! :D

all we'd need now is a fiddle player and maybe a dulcimer and we could be a bluegrass band!! :DA dulcimer (lap style) is the first stringed instrument I played. I've had it since 1980. The dulcimer's meant to be played alone, to accompany the player's singing. Traditionally they're tuned to an arbitrary pitch to suit the singer's voice, and tuned modally to play with a stick noting the paired melody strings, the other two being drones. The noter's used much like a slide, but pressing down so the melody strings are fretted. The frets are in a diatonic scale that plays the Myxolydian mode from the open strings. Some modern dulcimers have a doubled seventh fret with both the minor and major sevenths, so you can play an Ionian mode or major scale from the open strings. The tuning of the two bass strings determines the mode you play in; most traditional stuff's Myxolydian, but there's lots of old songs in Ionian, Dorian, Aeolian, Lydian, and Phrygian as well. The different modes start at different frets on the fretboard, as one would expect. Folk guitarists in the 1960s thought up fretting chords and playing them with other instruments like guitars. I've not heard a bluegrass band with a dulcimer, lap or hammered. Jean Ritchie really brought the lap dulcimer to widespread notice. There's a cool instrument called the McNally Strumstick that's a lap dulcimer neck with a very small resonating body, built to hang from a strap and play like a guitar, with the strings reversed to note the melody strings with a finger instead of a stick.