Mandolin Lessons: Learn how to play Bluegrass Mandolin, instructional lesson video

Very helpful as just learning to play.

I purchased this instructional dvd for one of my kid's. Was not that informative, we shelved this one and purchased another that was much more helpful.

Good overview of some of the fundamentals of mandolin playing. Tuning technique is the old fashioned reference pitch way. He then goes over chord structures, strumming techniques, and rhythm.It's a fundamentals disk. It's a good running start for playing, but it is agonizingly slow paced in the begining considering it's only about an hour long. The DVD is broken into chapters but it takes him a while to get to the good stuff. You will find yourself saying "Get on with it!" But don't worry, he does get to the instruction.A nice feature is that the short chord book and song guide is on the DVD in a PDF file for your computer or as a chapter for your DVD player. Good for people who loose things. But there wasn't a lot of substance. Three chords were fretted out for you. There was no tablature explanation or descriptions. A handful of simple songs was it. A little more to this feature could have been the package shine.All in all it's not a bad choice for beginners at a fairly low price.

I really enjoyed how Tom Bekeny takes his time to explain how to reallyget a solid start into Mandolin playing. Best of all, I liked thereference library in the bonus section of the DVD. This allows you tolearn the steps at your own pace without having to try to keep up withan instructor. There is a .pdf file in the dvd that you can access thatalso contains the tablature to the lessons in the DVD. you are alsogiven a password to go online and download and print the lessons. Tomcovers Bluegrass "chop" chords, McReynolds Crosspicking techniques,various scales and some Bluegrass songs like Old Joe Clark, Bile ThemCabbage Down, On and On and others.