Sierra Hull on switching between mandolin and guitar
Photo by Allen Clark
Earlier this year, I had the chance to do an in-depth interview for Acoustic Guitar with the masterful multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Sierra Hull.
A seven-time winner for mandolinist of the year at the International Bluegrass Music Awards, Hull is best known for her astonishingly fluid mandolin work—she began turning heads on the instrument as a kid growing up in small-town Tennessee and made her debut on the Grand Ole Opry at age ten. But guitar has also been part of her musical world since childhood and is a significant presence on her latest album, A Tip Toe High Wire.
Read an excerpt from the interview below. Find the complete feature in the November/October 2025 issue and online.
The print/digital issue includes my transcription of her beautiful guitar song “Spitfire,” which was nominated for a Grammy for Best American Roots Song.
In the video below, she performs “Spitfire,” along with a couple of other songs, and talks about the hybrid picking style she uses on it as well as many other songs (and on mandolin in addition to guitar).
When you switch between mandolin and guitar, does the difference in how the instruments are tuned require some kind of reset?
I probably should feel that way. But I think just because I started so young, coming from the bluegrass world, I really didn’t think about tuning as much as feel and even the muscle memory and patterns.
So much of my early playing was built around spending time with the instrument, learning from other people, learning fiddle tunes. Tony Rice was one of my biggest heroes—not just for guitar, but his records and the songs that he chose to sing. Being such a fan, I was sitting down and trying to learn my fair share of Tony Rice solos, and Doc Watson, all that kind of stuff. I loved guitar. And there is such a natural connection from, like I said, the right- and left-hand technique, I didn’t have to think about, I’m going to mandolin and I’m back to fifths. My brain at the time wouldn’t have even really known that’s what was going on. I didn’t learn to play music in a real technical way where I would have had the vocabulary for that.
As a guitarist, I’ve always felt that the symmetry of mandolin or fiddle tuning would allow a different kind of freedom in playing solos and melodies compared with guitar, just because of the rogue interval on guitar between the third and second string. Does that make sense to you?
It does. I hear a lot of people talk about that. On mandolin the tunings are parallel all the way through. You’re looking at a mirrored kind of thing from string to string. Plus, on mandolin I can jump an octave or three octaves in some cases pretty quickly. We have so much less real estate on the mandolin.
So yeah, on guitar, you don’t have that as much, but, man, there’s also so much more you can get at, because you just have a wider scope. You can play fuller chords. You can actually have bass notes in your chords. With mandolin, sometimes you’re shooting for the top end of the chord, and you might not even have the root in your chord.
