Best beginner mandolins

The mandolin is an unusual first instrument and a genuinely good one. Eight strings in four pairs, tuned in fifths exactly like a violin, on a scale short enough that the left hand barely has to stretch.

The pick states its Starter Path band, and we have not played it — the method is on how we pick.

What makes a mandolin sound like one

A mandolin top is not flat, and it is not bent. It is carved — cut from a solid block and graduated to different thicknesses across its area, thicker at the center and thinner toward the edges.

That graduation is what produces the instrument’s bark: the fast, percussive attack that cuts through a band. A pressed laminate top cannot be graduated, and the result is the muted, boxy sound of a cheap mandolin.

The Kentucky KM-150#ad uses select solid spruce, hand-carved and graduated, over solid maple back and sides. All-solid construction at the tier where laminate is still normal is why it is the pick.

A-style or F-style

The two body shapes look very different and matter less than they appear to.

An A-style is a simple teardrop. An F-style has a decorative scroll on the upper bout and usually points along the body.

The scroll is difficult and slow to carve, and it adds substantial cost with tonal differences that are small and heavily argued about. At any given price, an A-style puts that money into wood and construction instead.

For a beginner that trade is not close. Buy the A-style; if you fall in love with the instrument and want the scroll later, that is a purchase for a player who has earned the opinion.

The setup problem

A mandolin needs a setup more than any other fretted instrument we cover, and it is worth being blunt about why.

Eight strings under mandolin tension exert a lot of force, and the strings are thin enough to cut into a fingertip. If the action is high — and on an unset-up instrument it will be — every note demands real force, and the fingertips of a beginner simply cannot take it. People conclude the instrument is not for them when what they met was a setup problem.

A shop setup lowering the action at the nut and bridge transforms it. Budget for it as part of the purchase, the same way you would a first guitar.

What is genuinely different about playing one

Tuning in fifths. GDAE, low to high — the same as a violin. That means every chord and scale shape a guitarist knows is wrong, and it also means anyone who has played violin already knows where the notes are.

Paired strings. Each note is two strings tuned in unison, which gives the mandolin its shimmer and means the right hand has to strike both cleanly. This is the real technical challenge and it is a right-hand problem, not a left-hand one.

Everything is picked. There is no strumming tradition to fall back on the way there is on a guitar, so pick control matters from day one.

What to skip

Laminate-top mandolins. Covered above — the carved top is the instrument.

Very cheap F-style mandolins. The worst combination available: the money went into carving a decorative scroll instead of into the top that makes the sound.

Mandolin bundles with a bag, tuner, strings and picks under a very low total. Same arithmetic as everywhere else on this site. Add up the accessories and see what is left for the instrument.

What else you need

A clip-on tuner, since eight strings go out of tune twice as fast as four. Picks, which are consumable. A gig bag, and the Kentucky is commonly sold with one. And the setup above, which is the item that changes the instrument most.