How to practise

mandolin with a
broken hand
Exercises to improve your right-
hand technique

Edition 1

Written by Mike Giverin, August 2019

Table of Contents

Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 2

Practice Instructions ...................................................................................................... 3

Right hand theory in 4/4 ................................................................................................ 4

Chapter 1: Starting in 4/4 ............................................................................................... 6

Chapter 2: Harder patterns in 4/4 ..............................................................................10

Chapter 3: Adding accents and runs .........................................................................13

Chapter 4: Example tunes ............................................................................................17

Chapter 5: Patterns in 6/8 ............................................................................................22

Chapter 6: Example patterns and accents in 6/8 ....................................................26

Chapter 7: Exercises and examples in 3/4 ................................................................29

Chapter 8: Further examples of ‘regular’ time signatures ...................................32

Chapter 9: Playing in 5 .................................................................................................36

Chapter 10: Playing in 7 & beyond ............................................................................41

Summary ..........................................................................................................................45

1
Introduction
Dear fellow mandolin player; beware the Christmas party games! On
December 20th 2016, at a family gathering before half of the room were
leaving to spend Christmas in Ireland, we decided to play a game. An
empty cereal box is placed in the middle of the room, you have to try to
pick it up with your teeth, and your knees are not allowed to touch the
floor. Each round you cut a layer off the box until there is a winner, the
only person flexible enough to bend down and pick up the remnants of a
cereal box with their teeth. I am not flexible, but very competitive, and in
one of the final rounds with only me and my sister left in the competition, I
had my arms stretched out to provide more balance. I over-reached, fell
over and broke the middle finger on my left hand, rendering it useless for 4
weeks, minimum.
Before this break, the longest I had gone without some kind of
practice on the mandolin in 12 years is about a week for a holiday on a
non-mandolin friendly airline, so 4 weeks seemed like an age. I made the
decision very early on that I would not let this stop me playing the
mandolin and realised I could spend the next 4 weeks focussing soley on,
and improving, my right hand technique. This is what brings us to this pdf
worksheet.
I have written out all of the right hand exercises I developed during
that time and adapted them so that you’re not just playing the open strings
for hours on end (like I did for 4 weeks, much to my other half’s delight).
We will start with the basics of the right hand, a discussion on pick stroke
theory and then look at all of the different exercises you can do to improve
your playing. I will show you simple 4/4 exercises all the way to
crosspicking exercises in 7/8 and everything in between. This worksheet is
aimed at all levels of mandolin player, and there is something in here for
all of you to work on.
The right hand is as important, if not more important, than the left
hand and is always the main thing people get wrong with their mandolin
playing. When my left hand became use-able again at the end of January
2017, my mandolin skills had not dropped at all and to me that showed
how dominant the right hand is in dictating how good we are as a player. I
hope that this pdf worksheet will help you improve your right hand
technique and therefore make you a better player… and that you heed my
warning about family party games!

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Practice Instructions
This booklet is designed to be accessible and useful to any standard
of mandolin player. Anyone of any standard can use this worksheet to
improve their right hand at any point in their playing, it’s never too early
or too late to work on that right hand!
For beginner players, focus on getting the pick directions correct
and the notes clean, speed is not important to you yet. Take it slowly, get
the 4/4 exercises perfect before moving on to the harder stuff as there isn’t
much need for you to be mastering difficult 6/8 patterns at this early stage
of your mandolin playing.
For intermediate players, make sure the pick directions are correct
as you will never progress onto advanced material if you are not in control
of that right hand with it going up and down in the right places. Play along
with a metronome and slowly speed each exercise up as you get it clean.
Don’t worry too much beyond 4/4, 3/4 and 6/8 for now, as an intermediate
player, you won’t often come across tunes in 7 or 5.
For advanced players, all exercises are appropriate for you.
Everything should be clean, every pick direction correct and you should
always be playing along with a metronome. Use that metronome to slowly
crank up the speed as you warm up. You should also use this book as a
springboard to create your own patterns. There is an infinite number of
these sorts of exercises so I hope that you will take away my ideas and
create hundreds of your own.
There will be metronome tempo suggestions for the different
standards with each exercise and I highly recommend playing along to a
metronome as much as possible. When I play these exercises myself, I start
the metronome slowly and gradually increase the tempo as my right hand
loosens off.
Most of the the exercises & patterns will start with the phrase played
on open strings (as that’s how I played it when I first broke my finger),
then I’ll do the same pattern but with notes on the left hand so it doesn’t
sound so monotonous. I have chosen the notes pretty much at random,
most of the time it will be over some of the more common chord shapes.
You don’t have to stick to my suggested notes and I suggest you try each
pattern out with different chord shapes of your choosing.

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With each exercise I will note the pick directions for the first bar, and
where appropriate, I will add the finger instructions. They will be small
numbers above the stave and 0 = open string, 1 = first finger, 2 = middle
finger, 3 = ring finger and 4 = little finger. However the focus of this
worksheet is the right hand, so I am not too bothered what your left hand
is doing in this worksheet.
The intention of this booklet is to introduce you to 10 exercises that
you can slowly add to your repetoire. I do not play each of these 10
exercises every time I pick the mandolin up, they are used on rotation like
the players of a football squad; some I play almost every time, some I only
play once a week when I’m a little bored with my regular exercises, some
have made their way into my chord playing and accompaniment. They are
yours to practise as much as you wish, but I can guarantee that all of them
will improve your playing in one way or another.
If you would like to hear what any of these exercises sound like, plus
a litte extra discussion about each exercise, there is an mp3 walkthrough
available from mandomike.com

Right Hand Theory in 4/4

In 4/4, there are 4 beats to every bar: 1 2 3 4:

1 2 3 4
As well as the 4 beats, there are also 4 ‘off’ beats: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and
(often shortened to 1 a 2 a 3 a 4):

1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and

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A down stroke looks like this:

And an Up stroke looks like this:

The right hand theory in 4/4 is this:

Down ‘on’ the beat, Up ‘off’ the beat
Or shown visually:

1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and

I like to think of it as though your right hand should be matching

your foot (assuming your foot is tapping every beat). When you tap your
foot, you’re playing a down stroke, when your foot is raised, it’s an up
stroke. This is the most important thing for your right hand to get right. If
you are not playing these exercises with the correct up and down strokes,
then you are not using them correctly. Pretty much all modern
advanced/professional players, especially American/Bluegrass players,
stick to this principle; Chris Thile, Mike Marshall, Sierra Hull, Sam Bush,
Jake Joliff. In my opinion, you will not get to an advanced level of playing
unless you stick to this principle.
Lucky for you, I have made this pdf worksheet relatively
straightforward in the sense that all of the exercises use every beat and off
beat in the bar, so you will only have to focus on down-up-down-up-
down-up-down-up.

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Chapter 1 – Starting in 4/4

Metronome Suggestions:

Beginner: = 50 to = 80

Intermediate: = 80 to = 120

Advanced: = 60 to = 100

The best place to start is always with some simple exercise in 4/4.
Use the metronome suggestions as a guide to what speeds you should be
aiming for and the two things you should be focusing on are:
- Are your pick strokes correct?
- Are the notes clean?
That’s all that matters. I have broken this first exercise down into 11
different phrases, starting easy and progressing to more difficult patterns.

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Chapter 2 – Harder patterns in 4/4
Metronome Suggestions:

Beginner: = 50 to = 80

Intermediate: = 80 to = 120

Advanced: = 60 to = 100

Once you have worked through the easier patterns in 4/4, it’s time to
tackle some harder exercises. We’re still in 4/4, so you need to be playing
down on the beat, up off the beat .. no exceptions! These are laid out in the
same way as the previous exercise, so I have nothing extra to add, other
than keep that right hand Down on the beat Up off it!

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Chapter 3 – Adding accents and runs
Metronome Suggestions:

Beginner: = 50 to = 80

Intermediate: = 80 to = 120

Advanced: = 60 to = 100

We can now start to add some other elements to the exercises from
the first two chapters. I want to discuss two different techniques you can
add to make them harder and to improve your technique even further, they
are:
1) Adding accented notes
2) Adding runs on the left hand

Accented notes
For this exercise, I’m going to drop the
pick directions from the first bar as by now, you
should have realised that they are ALL Down
Up Down Up, and introduce a new symbol; the
accent. A note with this “>” sign over/under it
means you accent it a little more heavily than a
normal note. So the bar opposite would be
played:

Down Up Down Up
With the 3rd note played a little louder then the other three. So we’ll start
by extending that example and changing the accented note in the second
half to be Down Up Down Up.

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And here are two other examples of adding accents to previous exercises:

I now suggest you loop back and go through chapters 1 & 2 again and
try adding some accented notes into the exercises. It is up to you which
notes you accent, some are harder than others, for example, Chapter 1,
Exercise H, I find it tricky to play: Down Up Down Up (it’s actually tricky
to add the accent on the 2nd note for any of the exercises). One practice
technique I use is to pick one exercise and repeat it with the accent
changing after every repeat.
To some of you, adding accents may not seem like a very beneficial
use of precious practice time, but this is all about developing control in
your Right Hand. The more control you have over your pick strokes and
the more accurate you are, the better mandolin player you will be!

Runs on the left hand

The next bit of complexity we can introduce is some runs in the left
hand. When my hand started to heal after about 3 weeks, I could use my
first finger on the fretboard, so started to change one of the notes in the
pattern to create a bit of interest for myself. Here’s two examples using
Exercise A from Chapter 2.

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Just like the accented notes, you can now take this wherever you
want. This small section is just to hopefully provide a bit of an idea on how
to not make these exercises so monotonous. You could even play around
with accenting different notes as well as this moving bass line.

You can also start to combine different exercises together, so, we

could have 3 bars of Exercise A, Chapter 2 and then 1 bar of Exercise H,
Chapter 2:

To finish off this chapter, I have a few more different examples of

how you can have runs on the left hand combined with different exercises
to make the patterns from Chapters 1 and 2 a little more interesting.
Hopefully these should provide you enough inspiration to create your own
versions of these patterns.

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Chapter 4 – Example Tunes
Metronome Suggestions:

Beginner: = 70 to = 90

Intermediate: = 90 to = 140

Advanced: = 70 to = 110

Before we leave the relatively straightforward world of 4/4, I want to

show you a few examples of how these patterns can be used in actual songs
or tunes, rather than just as exercises to annoy the neighbours. We’ll start
with the simple, but well known tune of Boil Them Cabbages Down. It’s
one of the first tunes I ever learned on the mandolin, and the A part, if you
haven’t come across this tune before, is like this:

If you look at the chords over the top of the melody, it’s a relatively
simple G, C & D style progression that crops up a lot in many forms of
music. So, instead of just playing simple strumming chords, you could play
this progression using some of the patterns in previous chapters.

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Using Exercise A in Chapter 2:

Using Exercise J in Chapter 2

Or a mixture of Exercise G from Chapter 1 and Exercise A from Chapter 2:

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Hopefully you can see by now that there are many many different
ways you could use these patterns to create interesting accompaniment
instead of the more obvious chord shapes and strums.
You could also use these patterns to make a melody a bit more
interesting. Take the melody for Goodby Liza Jane for example:

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Using a mixture of the patterns and techniques from the first three
chapters, you could turn that quite sparse melody into something like this:

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I have one more challenge in this chapter for you advanced players
working through this book. The tune Grandfather’s Clock is a great melody
to apply these patterns to. I’ll just show you the A part, then the rest is up
to you:

That’s it for this chapter, I hope these 3 examples have given you a
little bit of inspiration on how you could incorporate the basic patterns in
your playing, rather than just as exercises.

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Chapter 5 – Patterns in 6/8
Metronome Suggestions:

Beginner: . = 50 to . = 70

Intermediate: . = 70 to . = 90

Advanced: . = 90 to . = 120

When we play in 6/8, the right hand technique changes. In 6/8,

quavers (8th notes) are in groups of 3, instead of groups of 4. We no longer
have 1 a 2 a 3 a 4 a, instead, we count bars
like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6. So we have to alter our
right hand to match. If we were to apply the
same theory as in 4/4, you would play a bar
of 6/8 like this…….
But as you can see, the second set of
the groups starts with an Up stroke
(circled). This doesn’t quite sit right and
makes the tune sound like your trying to play it in 4/4 with a note missing
from each group.
We correct this on the mandolin by playing this pattern:
Down Up Down Down Up Down Down Up Down Down Up Down

Each set of 3 starts on a Down stroke. This takes a bit of practice to

get used to, so for this chapter, I have 13 different patterns for you to work
through. Laid out in the same manor as Chapters 1 & 2, play along with
the metronome and focus on getting the pick direction correct for every
note and playing it clean.

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Chapter 6 – Further work in 6/8
Metronome Suggestions:

Beginner: . = 50 to . = 70

Intermediate: . = 70 to . = 90

Advanced: . = 90 to . = 120

In 6/8, the accented note is pretty much always on the first note of
each group of 3, so for this chapter, I’m not going to show you too many
variations of patterns from the previous chapter with different accented
notes. The best way of working on your 6/8 right hand technique is to get a
book of Irish tunes and play through them.
I can however, show you a few different examples of adding moving
patterns in the left hand to make the patterns a little more interesting.

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Chapter 7 – Exercises and examples in 3/4
Metronome Suggestions:

Beginner: = 60 to = 90

Intermediate: = 90 to = 120

Advanced: = 120 to = 170

Playing in 3/4 is very similar to playing in 4/4 (and as I’ll show you
later, so is playing in any version of 4 (2/4, 3/4, 7/4)). Instead of counting
1 a 2 a 3 a 4 a , we are now counting 1 a 2 a 3 a . There is still an ‘on’ beat
and an ‘off’ beat, so we stick to playing Down ‘on’ the beat and ‘up’ of it.
The following pages contain seven different patterns in 3/4, finished off
with 4 patterns with changing notes in the left. I haven’t added any
accented notes, but I suggest you take it upon yourself to add accents like
we did in 4/4 in Chapter 3.

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Chapter 8 – Further examples of ‘regular’
time signatures
Metronome Suggestions:
See suggestions in Chapter 5 for exercises
A to E
See suggestions in Chapter 4 for exercises
F to J

There are many more time signatures that I could give you exercises
for, and I could go through each one in some detail. That would not only
lead to a rather large pdf file, but also, once you have mastered playing in
4/4 and 6/8, the same right hand theory applies to many of the other time
signatures.
In this chapter I’m going to show you two examples of different time
signatures and hopefully that should give you all the information you need
to know how the right hand operates in commonly used time signatures.
We’ll start with 9/8. This is very similar to playing in 6/8 and is
counted: 123 456 789 with the same Down Up Down Down Up Down
pattern in 6/8. This theory would extend to anything in 8 with a multiple of
3 on the top, so 3/8, 6/8, 9/8, 12/8 etc etc. Anything other than a multiple of
3 (5/8, 7/8 31/8 etc) starts getting a bit weird and the following chapters
will explain that.

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Now I want to have a look at the time signature 3/2, this is counted:
1 a 2 a 3 a 4 a 5 a 6 a (very similar to 6/4). So we’re now back to having ‘On’
and ‘Off’ beats. Any time signature where you have ‘On’ and ‘Off’ beats, is
played the same in right hand as 4/4. So a bar of 3/2 looks like this:

Any variation of time signatures with 2 or 4 on the bottom are played

in the Down Up Down Up Down Up Down Up way. Some other examples
are 2/2, 2/4, 5/4 (which we’ll discuss in the next chapter), 6/4, 7/4, 5/2 etc
etc. But sticking with 3/2, here are some more patterns to work on:

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Chapter 9 – Playing in 5
Metronome Suggestions:

Exercises A to D tempo suggestion range is:

= 50 to = 200
Exercises E to N is: = 120 (quaver =120) for
beginners up to = 250 for advanced
(each click is one pick stroke)

There are two main types of time signatures in 5, one easy (5/4) and
one pretty tricky one (5/8). I briefly mentioned these in the previous
chapters, but I want to expand on the right hand theory and work through
some exercises.
We’ll start with the easier of the two; 5/4. This is just like playing in
3/4 or 4/4, you still have ‘On’ beats and ‘Off’ beats and is counted:

1 a 2 a 3 a 4 a 5 a
So your right hand is doing exactly the same thing as in 4/4 and 3/4.
You also normally add accents in the bar to create a group of 3 and a group
of 2. So you would either count it like this (accents in bold):

1 a 2 a 3 a 4 a 5 a or 1 a 2 a 3 a 4 a 5 a
(you might find it easier to count 5/4 as 12312 or 12123)

In the following four exercises, I have done two of each type of accent, you
should play around with movig the accent to get used to playing in 5.

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When we play in 5/8, that’s when it starts to really test your right
hand. As in 6/8 and 9/8, there are no longer ‘off’ beats and a bar of 5/8 is
just counted as 1 2 3 4 5. But, like in 5/4, the bar is always accented to
create a group of 2 and a group of 3. So 1 2 3 4 5 (12 123) or 1 2 3 4 5 (123
12). This all leads to a bit of a problem with your right hand. If we were to
stick to Down Up Down Up no matter what, this would happen:

The second bar starts on an

Up stroke … not ideal and
makes it sound like it’s part
of the 1st bar.

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So what you need to do in 5, is think of each bar as a group of two
notes and a group of 3. The group of 2 is always Down Up and the group of
3 is always D U D (like in 6/8). Put them together and you get these two
options of playing in 5, depending on which way round the groupings are:

1 2 1 2 3 1 2 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 1 2 3 1 2
D U D U D D U D U D D U D D U D U D D U

To finish this chapter in 5, here are 5 exercises in 5/8 starting with

the first pattern of 12 123 then the same exercises repeated but in 123 12
pattern. As always, the focus is on the right hand and getting every pick
stroke correct. Good luck!

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Chapter 10 – Playing in 7 & beyond

Metronome Suggestions:

Beginner: = 120 to 150 (quaver = 120)

Intermediate: = 150 to 200

Advanced: = 200 to 260

Just like playing in 5, there are two version of time signatures in 7.

There’s 7/4 which is just like 5/4, 4/4, 3/4 and you have probably guessed by
now that as it’s in 4, you play it ‘down up down up’ but over 7 beats. So, I’m
not going to cover 7/4 in this final chapter, instead, we’re going to focus on
the wonderful world of 7/8.
You need to think of 7/8 in a similar fashion to 5/8. A bar of 7/8 can be
split into 2 groups of 2 and a group of 3, meaning there are 3 different
version of 7/8. You don’t normally count it 1 2 3 4 5 6 7, you count it in
terms of 1 2 and 1 2 3. So the three different version are:

1 2 3 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 3 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 3

In terms of your right hand, you need to think of the group of 3 as

though it’s in 6/8 so D U D and the two groups of 2 as though they’re in 4
so D U D U. Each option has a slightly different feel to it due to the set of 3
being in a different place each time and therefore the ‘double down’ falls in
a different place in the bar.
The following pages contain four patterns for each of the 3 variations
of 7/8. Get the notes clean and the right hand pick strokes correct .
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Summary
That is all of the exercises I have for you in this pdf workbook, I think
40 odd pages of right hand patterns should be enough to keep you going for
a while. The intention of this book is not to prepare you for how to cope
without your left hand for a few weeks (a fate I hope none of you are
destined for), but to give you all the tools you need to get your right hand
technique absolutely perfect. There is no better way to improve as a
mandolin player than to work on your right hand.
More than just improving the basics of your technique I hope these
patterns start to work their way into your everyday playing like I
demonstrated in Chapter 4. There are so many occasions, especially when
accompanying other musicians and singers, that I find myself falling back
on versions of these patterns to play something other than the basic chord
shapes to add a little interest to a song.
I hope you have enjoyed playing through this pdf workbook … if one
can ‘enjoy’ playing right hand patterns over and over again … and it has
inspired you to look more at what your right hand is doing rather than just
concentrating on the left hand as so many people do.
If you ever have any questions about this pdf workbook, please do not
hesitate to get in touch via the contact page on mandomike.com.
Thank you for downloading this pdf
Mando Mike

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