Hey Bullet,
Been on vacation, hanging out in Santa Cruz. Man, I love that town.
Welcome to the world of mandolin.
First off, print some mandolin tablature pages and prepare to take notes.
You can find the tab pages here:
http://jacktuttle.com/jackspdfs/tabs/ma ... 0paper.pdf
To convert existing guitar tabs from this site, you will need to get down to the ABC's of it all and really knuckle down. The tablature pages should help.
I haven't tried the Chordie method previously mentioned. I will give it a-look-see.
I have a couple ways of getting things figured out on the mandolin.
The first way is to take a .wav file from a CD, edit out the break you want to learn and slow it down to about half speed and play along with it.
I use EAC (exact audio copy) to extract waves from a CD. I then use Cool Edit 96 to slow it down. The new version of Windows Media Player now has a feature that will slow wavs down as well. Not sure if you can save the slower version using Media Player.
Be sure to jot down (tab) any ideas you have as they may come in handy later. Don't throw anything away for days until you are sure you will never use it.
Learning Jerry's breaks on mandolin is tricky and time consuming. They really don't translate all that well in a traditional sense but you can learn some really cool tricks from the master...
The second method I use is to take the melody line from a Grateful Dead songbook and convert it to tab.
Let me know if there are any specific songs you are interested in and I will see if I can help.
Lately, I have been working on Dawg music and trying to get my breaks up to speed.
Be sure to visit
http://www.mandolincafe.com
it is a great resource for everything related to the mandolin.
