Mandolin in the context of "Perfect fifths"

In music, strumming is a way of playing a stringed instrument such as a guitar, ukulele, or mandolin. A strum or stroke is a sweeping action where a finger or plectrum brushes over several strings to generate sound. On most stringed instruments, strums are typically executed by a musician's designated strum hand (typically the musician's dominant hand, which is often responsible for generating the majority of sound on a stringed instrument), while the remaining hand (referred to as the fret hand on most instruments with a fingerboard) often supports the strum hand by altering the tones and pitches of any given strum.

Strums are often contrasted with plucking, as a means of vibrating an instrument's strings. In plucking, a specific string or designated set of strings are individually targeted to vibrate, whereas in strumming, a less precise targeting is usually used. Compared to other plucking techniques, any group of strings brushed in a single sweep by a plectrum could be considered a strum due to the plectrum's less precise string group targeting (however, a plectrum might simultaneously pluck a small group of strings without being considered a strum). In contrast, a musician could utilize a technique with more precise string group targeting (such as a fingerstyle or fingerpick technique) to pluck all the strings on a stringed instrument at once and this would still be considered a pluck, not a strum.

A plectrum is a small flat tool used for plucking or strumming of a stringed instrument. For hand-held instruments such as guitars and mandolins, the plectrum is often called a pick and is held as a separate tool in the player's hand. In harpsichords, the plectra are attached to the jack mechanism.

The mandore is a musical instrument, a small member of the lute family, teardrop shaped, with four to six courses of gut strings and pitched in the treble range. Considered a French instrument, with much of the surviving music coming from France, it was used across "Northern Europe" including Germany and Scotland. Although it went out of style, the French instrument has been revived for use in classical music. The instrument's most commonly played relatives today are members of the mandolin family and the bandurria.

The mandore arrived in France from Spain, and was considered a new instrument in French music books from the 1580s, but can be seen as a development of the gittern. In Spain the mandore was called vandola. Musicologist James Tyler said that the Spanish bandurria with three strings was the mandore, although it had four strings when it arrived in France. In its Spanish form the bandurria may have resembled the rebec.

The bouzouki (/buːˈzuːki, bʊˈ-/, also US: /bəˈ-/; Greek: μπουζούκι [buˈzuki]; plural. bouzoukis or bouzoukia, μπουζούκια) is a musical instrument popular in West Asia (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Cyprus), Balkans (Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria) and Turkey.

It is a member of the long-necked lute family, with a round body and a long neck with a fretted fingerboard. It has steel strings and is played with a plectrum, producing a sharp metallic sound, reminiscent of a mandolin but pitched lower. It is the precursor to the Irish bouzouki, an instrument derived from the Greek bouzouki that is popular in Celtic, English, and North American folk music.

Plucked string instruments are a subcategory of string instruments that are played by plucking the strings. Plucking is a way of pulling and releasing the string in such a way as to give it an impulse that causes the string to vibrate. Plucking can be done with either a finger or a plectrum.

Most plucked string instruments belong to the lute family (such as guitar, bass guitar, mandolin, banjo, balalaika, sitar, pipa, etc.), which generally consist of a resonating body, and a neck; the strings run along the neck and can be stopped at different pitches.

A session musician (also known as studio musician or backing musician) is a musician hired to perform in a recording session or a live performance. The term sideman is also used in the case of live performances, such as accompanying a recording artist on a tour. Session musicians are usually not permanent or official members of a musical ensemble or band.

Many session musicians specialize in playing common rhythm section instruments such as guitar, piano, bass, or drums. Others are specialists, and play brass, woodwinds, and strings. Many session musicians play multiple instruments, which lets them play in a wider range of musical situations, genres, and styles. Examples of "doubling" include double bass and electric bass, acoustic guitar and mandolin, piano and accordion, and saxophone and other woodwind instruments.

In signal processing, a band-stop filter or band-rejection filter is a filter that passes most frequencies unaltered, but attenuates those in a specific range to very low levels. It is the inverse of a band-pass filter. A notch filter is a band-stop filter with a narrow stopband (high Q factor).

Narrow notch filters (optical) are used in Raman spectroscopy, live sound reproduction (public address systems, or PA systems) and in instrument amplifiers (especially amplifiers or preamplifiers for acoustic instruments such as acoustic guitar, mandolin, bass instrument amplifier, etc.) to reduce or prevent audio feedback, while having little noticeable effect on the rest of the frequency spectrum (electronic or software filters). Other names include "band limit filter", "T-notch filter", "band-elimination filter", and "band-reject filter".

Old-time music is a genre of North American folk music. It developed along with various North American folk dances, such as square dancing, contra dancing and buck dancing. It is played on acoustic instruments, generally centering on a combination of fiddle (see old time fiddling) and plucked string instruments, most often the 5-string banjo without a resonator pan, guitar, and mandolin. Together, they form an ensemble called the string band, which along with the simple banjo–fiddle duet have historically been the most common configurations to play old-time music. The genre is considered by some to be a precursor to modern country music, but it is also has a contemporary active subculture of musicians in various parts of the United States. Old-time music can generally be distinguished from the more widely known bluegrass genre by the use of cross-tunings on the fiddle, by all melody instruments playing in unison, by a lack of individual instruments taking breaks to improvise, by sessions remaining in one tuning or key for an extended period (because fiddles and banjos are tuned especially for that key or even for one tune), and by banjos being frailed instead of finger-picked and lacking resonators to make them louder.

Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier) is a 1910 Cubist painting by Pablo Picasso. The artwork was one of Picasso’s early Analytic Cubist creations, through which he aimed to reduce organic forms to geometric shapes. It shows the model Fanny Tellier in the nude, with her hands on a mandolin. Tellier volunteered to model for Picasso but, according to the latter, eventually refused to continue sitting for him after the painting took longer to complete than she had expected. Picasso accordingly left the portrait unfinished, though later suggested that he could have done nothing further to improve it.

Picasso painted Girl with a Mandolin late in the spring of 1910, shortly before leaving Paris for the Catalan town of Cadaqués. It was a response to Woman with a Mandolin, a more abstract treatment of the same theme by his friend Georges Braque, and followed two other works by Picasso under the same title. It has been analysed as a partial move away from naturalism, though comparatively legible and close to the visible form by contrast with later Cubist works, and as an important step in Picasso's movement towards focusing on the study of geometric planes. It has also been interpreted both as a de-eroticised nude and as containing autoerotic implications. The art historian T. J. Clark called it "the most ingenious of Picasso's portraits".