The 14 essential mandolin chords

Tap any chord to hear it strummed with paired-course shimmer. The four vertical lines represent the four courses — each course is a pair of strings tuned identically. Numbers inside the dots are which finger to use: 1 = index, 2 = middle, 3 = ring, 4 = pinky. O above a course means play it open; × means don't play it.

Audio is synthesised with two slightly-detuned voices per note to mimic the paired courses. A real mandolin has the pick attack, the body resonance and the unique chorus of two real strings beating against each other — the synthesis approximates the shimmer but a Gibson F-5 does it for keeps.

How to read a mandolin chord diagram

A mandolin chord diagram is a flat picture of the fretboard as you'd see it if you held the instrument up facing you. The four vertical lines are the four courses — and each course is actually a pair of strings tuned to the same note. The leftmost course is the lowest-pitched (G), the rightmost is the highest (E). The horizontal lines are frets, with the thick line across the top being the nut at fret zero.

Each amber dot shows where to press a finger. Because both strings in a course sit right next to each other, one fingertip presses them both. The number inside the dot says which finger: 1 index, 2 middle, 3 ring, 4 pinky. An O above a course means play it open — touch nothing, let both strings ring. An × above a course means don't play that course.

The mandolin has narrower string spacing than a guitar, which sounds harder but is usually easier — your hand has less distance to cover. The catch is that fretting close to the nut is tighter, so accuracy matters from the first day. Press just behind the fret wire, not on top of it, and the note will ring clean with the lightest finger pressure.

Why mandolin tuning is genius — and why it's not guitar

The mandolin is tuned G-D-A-E from lowest course to highest — every adjacent course a perfect fifth apart. This is the same tuning as the violin, the same as a viola (an octave higher), and the same as a cello (two octaves higher). Anyone who plays a bowed string instrument can pick up a mandolin and the fretboard makes immediate sense.

The guitar, by contrast, is tuned in fourths (with one major third between the G and B strings to make first-position chords playable). Fourths give the guitar its forgiving chord geometry — three strings can sound the same note in a chord, which is why even a beginner G major rings full. Fifths give the mandolin something different: each chord is just three or four distinct notes, voiced very cleanly. Mandolin chords sound more transparent than guitar chords, almost piano-like.

The practical consequence: every guitar chord shape you know is useless on the mandolin, and vice versa. But the mandolin has only four courses instead of six strings, so there are fewer shapes to learn. Most players are strumming complete fiddle tunes within a fortnight.

The chop chord — bluegrass's signature move

Above the 14 chords on this page is a whole second technique that bluegrass mandolinists live inside: the chop chord. It's a closed, four-finger movable shape played up the neck, hit sharply on the offbeat — beats 2 and 4 in a 4/4 bar — and immediately damped by lifting the fingers. The result is the "chnk-chnk" pulse that drives every bluegrass band.

The technique was canonised by Bill Monroe (1911–1996), the father of bluegrass, who played a 1923 Gibson F-5 mandolin built and signed by Lloyd Loar. Monroe's right hand at high speed, chopping closed chords on the offbeats while the fiddle or banjo took the lead, is the defining sound of the genre. Every bluegrass mandolinist since — Sam Bush, Chris Thile, Sierra Hull, Mike Marshall — has built on that vocabulary.

Chop chords live above the 4th fret, so they don't fit the open-chord diagram style on this page. The standard movable G-chop shape is at frets 7-5-2-3 (with the index finger barring fret 2 across the inner two courses); shifting that whole shape two frets up gives A, four frets up gives B, and so on. Learning the open chords above first is the right path; chop chords are step two.

Three hundred years of mandolin music

The mandolin in its modern form descends from the Neapolitan bowlback mandolin of 18th-century Italy. Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) wrote two surviving mandolin concertos: RV 425 in C major for solo mandolin and RV 532 for two mandolins. Mozart scored a mandolin into the famous "Deh, vieni alla finestra" serenade in Don Giovanni (1787), and Beethoven wrote four short sonatinas for mandolin and harpsichord around 1796 (WoO 43 and WoO 44).

The instrument we know in bluegrass today is a different design entirely. In 1923, Lloyd Loar, Gibson's master acoustician, signed off on the production F-5 model — a carved-top, F-hole, body-with-scroll design that projected loud enough to compete with banjos and fiddles in string bands. Loar-signed F-5s from 1922–1924 now sell for upward of $200,000. The model is still in production today, virtually unchanged.

Outside bluegrass, the mandolin keeps turning up everywhere. Rod Stewart's "Maggie May" (1971) is centred on Ray Jackson's mandolin riff. R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" (1991) was written on a mandolin Peter Buck had just bought, and the mandolin riff is the song. Mumford & Sons put it back into the pop charts in the 2010s. Chris Thile won a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in 2012 — at least partly for proving the mandolin still has unexplored territory.

Practical tips for learning these chords

Press just behind the fret wire. The mandolin's narrow string spacing punishes pressing in the middle of a fret — strings buzz immediately. Land your fingertip as close to the next fret as you can without sitting on the wire itself. This is the single most important habit.

Both strings in a course must ring. A fingertip pressing only one of the two paired strings creates a quiet buzz. Get used to applying pressure evenly across both. The good news: the strings are sitting against each other, so once your finger is positioned correctly, both ring naturally.

Use a tear-drop or pointed pick. Mandolin picks are generally heavier than guitar picks (around 1.5mm versus 0.7mm for a typical guitar pick) and slightly pointed to articulate notes cleanly between the courses. A flexible guitar pick will work but won't give you the crisp attack the instrument is capable of.

Tune to a tuner, not to itself, every session. Paired courses go out of tune against each other faster than you'd expect — a course out of tune with itself sounds like a sour wash, not a clean note. The free mandolin tuner is here →

Pick tunes in G and D first. These are the two natural mandolin keys because both root notes are open strings. "Soldier's Joy," "Wildwood Flower," "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," "You Are My Sunshine" — all standard beginner mandolin tunes, all in G or D. The chord shapes you've learned on this page handle the entire common repertoire.

Looking for mandolin tabs to specific tunes?

This page teaches the chord shapes. For tune-specific mandolin tabs and arrangements, mandolincafe.com hosts the largest community archive of bluegrass and folk mandolin transcriptions, and thesession.org has the canonical archive of Irish traditional tunes (most of which sit naturally on the mandolin because of the shared tuning with the fiddle).

A printable beginner-tunes page is on our build list.

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