Quote:
Originally Posted by norseman
... Out of this confusion will come some kind of understanding - at least that is what I want to believe.
If anyone else has been down this road, I'd be interested in hearing your story.
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When I was 10 years old I started playing violin. This of course is usually tuned in 5ths just like mandolin. When I was 13 I started playing 6 string acoustic guitar, and electric bass guitar (and I got into bluegrass fiddle). I found each instrument was different enough from the others that I didn't get the fingerings confused. Many years (35) later I started playing mandolin. It came quite naturally to me as it is a little like melding the violin and guitar skills together. I soon got into octave mandolin and mandocello. I started making more sense of basic music building blocks like chord structure, intervals, different modes, transposition, etc. When you know the fretboard/fingerboard of your instrument; when you know where all the notes are, it becomes harder to confuse chord forms and scales between your instruments. Knowing where the root, 3rd and 5th are for each chord inversion on each instrument, and training your ear to identify those intervals is a huge help.
If none of this makes sense or if it seems too theory oriented, most of the pickers I know couldn't care less about any of this and they play just fine. It has worked well for me - I became an advanced mandolin-family instrument player in my 40's in less than 2 years. To reach the same level of proficiency on guitar took me over 5 years in my teens, when my mind, fingers and tendons were much more elastic and I didn't have to support a family.