What this site is for
Mandolin Warrior covers the instruments tuned in fifths and strung in courses: mandolin, mandola, octave mandolin, mandocello and the Irish bouzouki. Two facts shape every page on it. The tuning is in fifths, so moving a shape across the strings jumps a much larger interval than it would on an instrument tuned in fourths, and closed chords tend to drop notes rather than double them. And the strings come in pairs, so a fingering has to sit clean on two at once — a diagram showing four positions is describing eight strings.
The reward is that one vocabulary covers the whole family: mandola, octave mandolin and mandocello are this tuning in other registers, so a chord learned here moves bodily between them. The limit runs the other way. Nothing on this site transfers to an instrument tuned in fourths, and the repertoire it assumes is very largely fiddle repertoire — both of which have their own homes.
Where to go instead
String WarriorOne chord across twenty-odd tunings at once, the fastest way to see what fifths cost you and what they buy.
Theory WarriorThe intervals a fifths tuning puts under your hand, named and explained away from any fingerboard at all.
Keys WarriorTwo courses to a note and a tremolo to sustain it; a keyboard's sustain is a pedal and its polyphony is a number on a spec sheet. Two unrelated answers to the same problem of making a struck string last.
Ukulele WarriorFour strings in fourths with a reentrant top — a similar short scale, an entirely different geometry.
Bass WarriorThe bottom of the arrangement, well below even a mandocello, where a walking line replaces the chop.
Guitar WarriorSix strings in fourths, and the shapes most players arrive carrying — useful mostly for seeing what will not carry over.
Banjo WarriorThe other pick-driven voice in the same tunes, with rolls where you would chop and a drone you do not have.
Fiddle WarriorYour exact tuning, bowed and fretless: these are its tunes, and its phrasing is worth stealing wholesale.
Ear WarriorTuned in fifths, intervals sit under the hand as fixed shapes — useful, and a way to stop listening. That site takes the shape away, asks for the name, and publishes the near misses one moved tone from it.
Bluegrass WarriorHow the chop, the break and the backup fit around everyone else in the circle, seat by seat.
Music Warrior NetworkFifths tuning, chop chords and tunes are ours; the question of which sister owns a chord you saw on a guitar, or a key you cannot name, belongs to that site — the map of the whole network, one subject per card.
Nashville WarriorA chop chord is already shape-first and measured from the tonic, which is half of that site's argument made physical. The other half is reading it at speed in whatever key the singer has just picked.
Mariachi WarriorHere the interest is in what one player does with a break. There nobody takes one — the armonía plays a single pattern in unison and the melody is several players on one written line. Worth seeing an arrangement with no soloist in it.
Jazz WarriorChord melody on a short scale hits the same wall their guitar seat does: three or four notes, and the root belongs to someone else. Worth reading how a whole tradition organised itself around that limit instead of working around it.
Country WarriorThe chop with its reason attached: there is no drummer, so the backbeat is somebody's job, and it is yours. That site places the part inside the arrangement it belongs to and declares the silence on either side of the hit.
Tres WarriorDoubled courses on both, picked rather than struck as blocks on both — but a mandolin's pairs are tuned in unison for volume, and the tres's are octave-split for a shimmer that is the sound itself rather than a side effect.
Sitar WarriorBoth necks carry more strings than the player has fingers for, but a mandolin's pairs are tuned in unison to be struck together while a sitar's extra strings are never touched at all — they ring on their own, which has no mandolin equivalent.
Oud WarriorDoubled courses and a plectrum on both — but the mandolin's pairs sit over frets in fifths and the oud's over nothing at all in fourths, so tremolo and taqsim end up asking opposite things of the same right hand.
Cuatro WarriorThe Puerto Rican cuatro is the network's other five-course picked lead voice, and a genuinely different answer to the same design: ten steel strings built to carry a melody through a jibaro ensemble rather than a fiddle tune.
Charango WarriorAnother course-strung neck, five of them this time, tuned so the pitches do not climb in order. If doubled courses and a high register are your daily arithmetic, that site works the same ground with a different answer.
Cavaquinho WarriorYour chop and theirs are cousins — a muted strike that still puts a pitch on top. Theirs is on four steel strings in samba, written out eighth by eighth, and it is the most rigorous treatment of that stroke anywhere in the network.
Gear WarriorWe can show you the chop chord and not whether the mandolin under it is worth the asking price, or which of the famous names is still an independent workshop.
Blues WarriorA fiddle tune's chords stay inside one key; a blues puts a dominant seventh on every bar, so a note that fits bar one can rub in bar five. That site shows exactly where, form by form, in any key.
Flamenco WarriorA reel keeps to bars of four even beats. A soleá groups its twelve counts 3+3+2+2+2, and that site lays out that grouping, and the seguiriya's 2+2+3+3+2, count by count.
Progression WarriorA fiddle-tune chord line rarely leaves its key, which makes the one chord that does easy to miss. That site reads a typed line, names that chord, and says which move it makes.
Pedal Steel WarriorA mandolin chord is built by four fretting fingers. A steel has no fretting hand at all: a bar lies across the strings, and that site lists the chords a straight bar holds on the lap steel and both pedal steel necks.
Scales WarriorFiddle tunes on the mandolin sit in Mixolydian and Dorian about as often as in plain major. That site maps how those modes lie next to each other and to the rest: 49 modes in seven families, linked by single altered degrees.
Music Warrior AIThrough that site an AI assistant can look up a chord's frets on the mandolin, the mandola or the octave mandolin, from this network's data rather than a guess, and it cites this site's page for that chord as the source.
How the sites divide the work
Every family has one home, decided by tuning and repertoire rather than by spelling. That is why the mandocello sits here next to the mandolin despite the gulf in size and register, and why the bass VI is on Bass Warrior and the guitalele on Ukulele Warrior even though both read like guitars. Anything that crosses those borders is String Warrior’s work — it is the site that carries every instrument at once.
More sites are being built. None of them appears in the list above until it opens.