Banjo vs Mandolin: Which Is Easier, and Which One to Buy

Pick up a five-string banjo, put both hands in your lap, and strum it. That is a G major chord, in tune, played properly, before you have learned anything. Pick up a mandolin and do the same thing and you get four notes that do not belong together, because a mandolin is tuned in fifths and nothing about it is a chord until your fingers make one.

That is the first fortnight decided. It is not the answer to the question, because the two instruments are difficult in opposite hands. On a banjo the fretting hand is close to free and the picking hand is the entire instrument. On a mandolin the picking hand is a flatpick — the most ordinary technique in stringed music — and every hard thing about the instrument is happening under your left fingertips.

Side by side

Figures below are Gold Tone’s, which is useful because Gold Tone builds both instruments and measures them the same way. The banjo column is their AC-1; the mandolin column is their GM-35 and GM-55, which agree with each other on every dimension that matters here.

They are hard in opposite hands

This is the whole comparison, and it is why “which is easier” has no single answer. The two instruments load the difficulty onto different arms, and which arm you would rather struggle with is a real preference that people have.

The banjo: a free left hand and a picking hand that takes months

Open G tuning does an enormous amount of work. The five strings are g–D–G–B–D, a G major already assembled, so the instrument is consonant before you touch it. One finger gives you a different chord. Two fingers gives you another. Somebody who has never held an instrument can accompany a simple song inside an hour, and that is not a sales pitch — it is a consequence of the tuning.

The bill arrives in the right hand. Bluegrass means Scruggs-style rolls: fixed eight-note patterns of thumb, index and middle finger that have to run underneath a tune at speed, automatically, before any melody can be threaded through them. Old-time means clawhammer, a downward strike with the back of a fingernail followed by the thumb dropping onto that fifth string — a motion you have almost certainly never made with your hand before, and one that takes months rather than weeks to stop being conscious. There is more on both in how hard the banjo is to learn.

The mandolin: an ordinary picking hand and a left hand doing something small and exact

A mandolin is played with a flatpick held the way a guitar pick is held, so if you have ever strummed anything, the right hand starts most of the way home. What is difficult is on the fingerboard, and it is difficult from the first note rather than from month three.

Every note is two strings. A fingertip has to hold both cleanly or the note buzzes on one and rings on the other, and that is easy to hear as bad playing rather than as one string not being pressed. The frets are half the size they are on almost anything else, so a finger that lands a couple of millimeters wide is on the wrong note. And the chord that defines mandolin rhythm — the chop, a closed four-finger shape struck and immediately damped — is a genuinely hard grip that most people cannot make for the first few weeks. How hard the mandolin is to play goes through each of those.

So the banjo is easier for a fortnight and the mandolin is easier from about month two, when the banjo’s picking hand becomes the whole problem and the mandolin’s fretting hand starts behaving. After the first year neither is easier than the other. Both take as long as anything else takes.

The numbers underneath that

A banjo’s scale length is 26³⁄₁₆” on Gold Tone’s spec sheet and 26¼” on Deering’s. A mandolin’s is 13¾”, and Ibanez publishes 350 mm — 13.8″ — for the M510. So a mandolin neck is not a bit shorter than a banjo neck. It is half of one, and every fret spacing halves with it.

The gap between the nut and the first fret is about an inch and a half on a banjo and about three quarters of an inch on a mandolin. The twelfth fret sits thirteen inches up a banjo neck and just under seven up a mandolin’s. That ratio holds all the way to the body, so a stretch that is comfortable on one is either a reach or a pile-up on the other.

The necks are almost exactly as wide as each other, and that is the part people do not expect. Gold Tone cuts its banjo nut at 1³⁄₁₆” and its mandolin nut at 1⅛” — about five percent narrower — and then puts eight strings across it instead of five. Ibanez states 30 mm at the nut with 10 mm between courses. A mandolin fingerboard is not a small version of a banjo fingerboard; it is a considerably more crowded one.

The strings differ in the same direction. Gold Tone ships its banjos with .011, .013, .016, a wound .024 and another .011, and its mandolins with .011, .016, a wound .026 and a wound .040 — each of those doubled. The heaviest string on a mandolin is nearly twice the gauge of the heaviest on a banjo, and there are two of it. That is why a banjo is kind to fingertips that have never played anything and a mandolin is not, and it is also why D’Addario lists a five-string banjo set at around $6.50 and its mandolin sets at $9 to $13.

Which one fits your hands

Those two measurements point in opposite directions, and between them they settle the question for a fair number of people.

Short fingers and a short reach favor the mandolin. Nothing on it is more than a few frets away, and the shapes that cripple beginners on a long-scale instrument are comfortable inside one hand position.

Broad fingertips favor the banjo, strongly. Five strings across 1³⁄₁₆” leaves roughly a quarter of an inch of clear space per string, and the frets are far enough apart that a finger sits between them rather than on one. Eight strings across 1⅛” does not, and a fingertip that keeps muting the course next door is a fit problem rather than a technique fault. If you have thick hands, try a mandolin in a shop before you order one, and read the two-strings-under-one-finger paragraph above as a warning rather than a detail.

For a child the mandolin is usually the easier object to hold — two and a half pounds against nearly four to six, and a body about the size of a hardback book. A banjo with a resonator on it is a genuinely heavy thing to sit under for half an hour.

What you already play changes the answer

Fiddle or violin. Take the mandolin, and stop reading. It is tuned G–D–A–E, the same as your fiddle, over a scale of 13¾” against a violin’s roughly 13″ of speaking string. Everything your left hand knows transfers on the first afternoon: the same fingerings, the same keys, the same tunes, the same positions. There is no other pair of instruments on this site where the transfer is as complete, and all you are learning is a pick.

Guitar, strummed with a pick. Both are a fresh start for the left hand — banjo chord shapes are their own thing and mandolin fifths tuning shares nothing with the guitar’s fourths. What differs is which hand you keep. The mandolin keeps your pick hand; the banjo keeps almost none of your technique but hands you a tuning that plays chords for you. We take that comparison apart in mandolin vs guitar and banjo vs guitar.

Guitar, fingerpicked. This tilts to the banjo. Thumb-and-fingers independence is exactly what Scruggs rolls are built on, and it is the part that takes everyone else months.

Mandolin already, wanting a banjo. The five-string will not feel like a relative — the tuning is unrelated and the picking hand is unrelated. The tenor banjo is the natural jump instead, because it is tuned in fifths too and is played with a flatpick. Tenor banjos covers what that means and what it costs.

The banjo asks you to choose a school before you start

There is a practical cost attached to that, and it arrives before the first lesson. There are two ways to play a five-string banjo, they have almost nothing in common, and the books, the videos and the teachers are separate. Bluegrass three-finger picking plucks upward with a thumbpick and two metal fingerpicks. Clawhammer strikes downward with the back of a nail. Buying a method for one of them and then discovering you wanted the other means starting over, and the instruments differ too — bluegrass wants a resonator behind the head, old-time usually does not. That is the argument in open back vs resonator.

A mandolin has one right hand. Downstrokes and upstrokes with a pick, tremolo when a note has to last, and the chop for rhythm. Those are three uses of one technique rather than two techniques, and every beginner method teaches them in the same order. If the idea of committing to a style you have not heard enough of yet puts you off, that alone is a reason to start on the mandolin.

They are not really competing for the same seat

Worth saying plainly, because pitting the two against each other obscures it: in a bluegrass band there is one of each. They are not alternatives to one another in the music where both are common — they are two different jobs, and a band that has one wants the other.

The mandolin carries the melody and provides the backbeat. It plays the tune when it is that instrument’s turn, and it chops on two and four the rest of the time, doing the job a snare drum does in music that has no drums. It is a fiddle-shaped role, and mandolin players and fiddlers read the same tune books.

The banjo makes a texture. In bluegrass a roll runs continuously underneath everything, whether or not the banjo is the instrument being listened to, and the banjo’s breaks come out of that texture rather than interrupting it. In old-time it is a rhythm instrument first and a melodic one second. It is not a lead instrument that happens to be twangy.

Outside that overlap they part company. The mandolin is at home in Irish and Scottish sessions, in classical repertoire going back three centuries, in country, in swing and in a great deal of modern folk and rock. The five-string banjo is an American instrument with an American repertoire — bluegrass, old-time, some country and a fringe elsewhere. If the music you actually listen to is not on that first list, that is your answer, and if it is bluegrass you will end up owning both eventually anyway.

How loud each one is, and why it matters more than you think

A banjo’s soundboard is a plastic head stretched over an eleven-inch rim and tensioned by sixteen to twenty-four brackets, with the bridge standing directly on it. It is a drum being played by strings, designed to cut through a band with no amplification at all. That is the sound the instrument is for, and it is also a sound that travels through a wall, through a floor, and into a conversation happening in another room.

A mandolin is a small carved wooden box — an Ibanez M510’s body is 13⅝” long, 10⅞” across and 2″ deep. It is loud for its size and it is not in the same category. A mandolin can be practiced in an apartment in the evening. A banjo, honestly, cannot, and a beginner practicing rolls is repeating the same eight notes for an hour.

There are mutes for banjos and they work, at the cost of most of the tone you bought the instrument for. If you live with other people and cannot practice at a time when they are out, weigh this before anything else on this page.

What each one costs

The mandolin is cheaper to try and roughly level after that. A complete beginner mandolin with a bag, a tuner and spare strings runs about $100; a five-string banjo worth owning starts around $175, and it comes with nothing. That gap closes fast. The rung where a banjo starts arriving properly adjusted is about $315, and the rung where a mandolin gets a carved solid top and starts improving with playing is about $400. The full ladders are in how much a banjo costs and how much a mandolin costs.

Budget for a setup on either. Nothing under a few hundred dollars has been adjusted by a person before it ships, and the adjustment is what makes an instrument playable rather than merely complete. A banjo setup runs $50 to $100 — head tension, bridge placement, action, string change. A mandolin setup runs $60 to $125, and it is dearer for a specific reason: the bridge is not glued down. It stands on the top under string pressure alone, so positioning it is part of the job every time, and some shops charge over their guitar rate for that.

After that both are cheap to keep. Strings a few times a year at around $6.50 for a banjo set and $9 to $13 for a mandolin set, a head on a banjo every several years, and nothing else. Neither has moving parts or electronics.

What to buy, either way

Two on each side: the cheapest instrument that answers the question honestly, and the one that is worth owning if you already know the answer.

The two things to buy alongside

A chromatic clip-on tuner, on either instrument. It clamps to the headstock, reads the string through the wood and ignores the room, which matters because a mandolin’s paired strings have to be tuned to each other as well as to a pitch, and because a beginner’s ear cannot yet tell a slightly flat banjo from a badly played one. The Donner arrives with one; the Jameson and the Gold Tone do not.

Fingerpicks, if you went with the banjo and you are heading for bluegrass. A thumbpick and two metal fingerpicks are what Scruggs-style playing is done with, and starting on bare fingers and switching later means relearning the feel of the strings. Clawhammer players need neither, which is another reason the school question is worth settling early.

Where each one came from

The banjo descends from West African plucked lutes — the akonting, the ngoni and the xalam among more than sixty gourd-lute instruments across the region. Enslaved West Africans carried the tradition to the Caribbean and colonial North America and rebuilt it from what was available: a gourd body, a hide stretched over it, a wooden neck and gut strings. The short thumb string that defines the five-string is the oldest idea in it; the akonting has one too. Frets, a wooden rim and mass production all arrived in the nineteenth century.

The mandolin came out of the Italian lute family. The older Brescian and Cremonese instruments carried four single gut strings tuned in fifths — the same G–D–A–E as today, without the doubling — and the louder Neapolitan form with doubled metal courses replaced them. The instrument most people picture, though, is much younger than either: the carved, f-holed, scrolled mandolin is Gibson’s F-5, designed by Lloyd Loar in 1922, and it is the shape bluegrass was built on twenty years later. Both instruments are older than they look and both took their modern form within living memory of each other. Types of banjos and types of mandolins follow each family from there.

Frequently asked questions

Which is easier to learn, banjo or mandolin?

The banjo for the first two weeks and the mandolin for the six months after that. Open G tuning means a banjo plays a chord with nobody touching the neck, so the first evening is far more rewarding. But the banjo’s difficulty is all in the picking hand and it takes months to clear, while the mandolin’s is in the fretting hand and clears the way ordinary practice clears things. Past the first year neither is easier.

Can you play the same music on both?

Some of it. In bluegrass and old-time they overlap, but they overlap the way a rhythm guitar and a lead guitar overlap — the tunes are shared and the jobs are not. Outside that, the mandolin goes places the five-string banjo does not: Irish and Scottish sessions, classical repertoire, swing, country, a lot of modern folk and rock. The five-string is an American instrument with an American repertoire.

Does playing the mandolin help you learn the banjo?

Barely, for the five-string. The tunings are unrelated, so no shape transfers, and a flatpick teaches you nothing about rolls or clawhammer. What does transfer is everything that is not the instrument — your ear, your timing, your sense of where a tune is going. If you want a banjo that uses what you already have, the tenor banjo is tuned in fifths and played with a pick, and it is the obvious move for a mandolin player.

Why does a mandolin have eight strings for four notes?

Volume, originally. Two strings tuned in unison are louder than one and they beat against each other very slightly, which is what gives the instrument its shimmer. It is also why the fretting hand has to be exact: the finger has to hold both strings of a course or one buzzes while the other rings. How many strings a mandolin has goes into the variants.

Which is better for a child?

Usually the mandolin, on size alone. It weighs two and a half pounds against nearly four to six, the body is about the size of a hardback book, and the frets are close enough together that a small hand can make chords without a stretch. The counterargument is that a child gets a satisfying noise out of a banjo on the first day and out of a mandolin in the second week, and for some children that matters more than anything.

Which is louder?

The banjo, by a distance. Its head is a tensioned drum with the bridge standing on it, built to cut through a band with no amplification. A mandolin is a small carved box and is loud for its size, which is not the same thing. If you share walls, the banjo is the harder instrument to own.

How much should I spend to find out which I prefer?

About $100 on the mandolin side and about $175 on the banjo side, plus a setup at $60–125 or $50–100. Below those figures on either instrument you are buying something harder to play than it should be, and a beginner cannot tell a badly made instrument from their own lack of skill — which is the most expensive way there is to give up.

Can I learn both?

Yes, and in bluegrass a lot of people do, because a band needs one of each. Learn one to the point where you are not thinking about your hands before you start the other, though. Two instruments at three months each is slower than one instrument at six.

Do I need to read music?

No, on either. Banjo material is almost entirely tablature — a diagram of which string and which fret rather than a pitch on a staff. Mandolin material comes both ways, and mandolin players who came from the fiddle usually read notation because the tune books they share are written in it. Neither instrument makes reading a prerequisite for playing.

So which one?

Choose by the hand you would rather have trouble with, and by the sound you cannot stop thinking about. If you already play fiddle the tuning decides it. If you have thick fingertips or thin walls, that decides it. Where it is genuinely a tie, the mandolin costs less to find out about, asks you to commit to less, and lives in more music — start there, and know that the banjo is a fortnight of fun ahead and several months of work behind.

Whichever way you go, spend the setup money. It is the difference between an instrument that plays and one that fights, and it is the cheapest upgrade available on either. Beginner mandolins and beginner banjos go further into the rung above the ones here.