Blank mandolin tab paper
Four-line tablature for mandolin, where each line is a course of two strings rather than a single string.
Opens with these settings already loaded. Change anything you like, then download as PDF, PNG or SVG.
Four lines for eight strings
A mandolin has eight strings arranged as four courses, each course a pair tuned in unison. Tablature draws one line per course, not per string, because you always fret and pick both strings of a course together. So a mandolin tab stave has four lines despite the instrument having eight strings, which surprises people coming from guitar tab where lines and strings correspond one to one.
Tuned in fifths, like a violin
Mandolin is tuned GDAE from the lowest course, which is the same as a violin. That has two consequences worth knowing. Violin and fiddle repertoire transfers directly, which is why so much mandolin music is fiddle tunes. And the intervals between courses are wider than on a guitar, so chord shapes are unrelated to guitar shapes and scale patterns cover more frets per position.
Mark the tremolo
A great deal of mandolin technique is tremolo, the rapid repeated picking that sustains a note the instrument cannot otherwise hold. Tablature has no built-in way to show it, so mark it above the stave with the conventional slashes through the stem or a wavy line. A transcription without it reads as a series of single notes and loses the thing that makes the part sound like a mandolin. The chord chart sheet is the companion.
Printing it accurately
This only measures correctly if your printer doesn't rescale the page. In the print dialog set Scale: 100%, not "Fit to page" or "Shrink oversized pages". If you're not sure it worked, print the calibration page, measure the ruler on it with a real ruler, and it will tell you exactly what your printer is doing to the page.