How to Play Birdy on the Mandolin

Hi there. Welcome to the onlinelessonvideos.com. I'm Ian Welsh and you just heard a tune on the mandolin called “Birdy”. It’s in the key of C and let’s get into our lesson. I'm going to teach you how to play it. We’re going to start with the melody and then I'll show you the chord progression and the chop progression that you can use on it. So let’s get started.

Okay, let’s get started here. This tune is in the key of C. So we make a C chord on our mandolin here using the standard three finger chord, just like that, just let that ring out, all four of your strings. You can also play this chord in more of an open position like that. That’s your C. But a lot of these notes that we’re going to see right at the beginning even kind of come out of this chord here. You play a C arpeggio. We’re going to use a lot of stuff in this position. Your third fingers on the G and your second fingers on the C. and you let the open E ring out.

So the first little beat in this tune… and this is really the intro. The first note for this tune will be that open E. So we’re leading in. This is some pick up notes. We start on the G and I'm using a slide in there, slide into my C. We have that, we move on.

So now, let’s go from that first note, the E. So we start, if I counted it in, one, two, three, four… and you can see I'm just using my second and third finger a lot here. Here we are on the E. Let’s put that together with the intro. And for the intro, I'll count in into three, one, two, and three. Let’s try it again, one two three. Let’s move on.