Live Wire: A Conversation with Masterful Mandolinist, Guitarist, and Songwriter Sierra Hull

Sierra Hull seems to be everywhere on the Americana/roots music scene these days—leading her own band as mandolinist, singer, and songwriter; picking bluegrass with Béla Fleck and Sturgill Simpson; playing duets with Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, Tommy Emmanuel, or her husband, Justin Moses; writing and performing with funk/jazz guitarist Cory Wong; and sitting in with bands of all stripes. In every setting, Hull exudes both mastery and joy on her instrument, thriving on the energy of collaboration.

Somehow in the midst of all this activity, Hull, 34, continues to forge ahead as a songwriter and bandleader, taking a big step forward with her latest release, A Tip Toe High Wire. As ever, her music sits on a foundation of traditional bluegrass, but with the addition of drums and a wide-open rhythmic sensibility, her latest songs range from funky acoustic pop (“Boom”) to blazing instrumental fusion (“E Tune,” with Fleck) to luminous folk balladry (“Spitfire”). The album received four Grammy nominations, including Best American Roots Song for “Spitfire” (a full transcription is available in the November/December 2025 print/digital issue of AG).

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 A Tip Toe High Wire. As Hull shares in this conversation, on a video call from her home in Nashville, mandolin and guitar work together to power her songwriting and creativity.

You started very young on the mandolin, but when did guitar first come into your life?

Pretty early, actually. I started playing mandolin when I was eight. I got a fiddle for Christmas to begin with. It was full size, so it was just too big. My dad was like, “We’ll get you a smaller one—trade it in or something. In the meantime, the mandolin is tuned like the fiddle, so we can give you a little bit of a mandolin lesson. You’ll know at least where to put your fingers.”

I don’t know if it was because mandolin was the first instrument that I actually got to make music on, but that became my main instrument. My dad was already playing guitar a little bit at that time, and I have an older brother who plays as well. So I felt like I was around the acoustic guitar as much as anything, just watching someone play. The mechanics I was learning with the mandolin were also so similar, as far as the flatpicking guitar stuff goes—pick hold, pick strokes, placement of fingers on the frets, all that kind of dexterity stuff. It felt like a really natural progression to pick up the guitar. The guitar came quickly as a result of having a year of playing mandolin under my belt, and recognizing what a C chord and a G and D looked like. I had a bit of an advantage just from that.

In the bluegrass world, it’s common for people to pick up multiple instruments—guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle. Do you think that’s built into the background?

Maybe so. Musicians have such a community within the bluegrass world. There’s a sense of sharing what you know. Everybody’s always so willing to be like, “Oh, cool—you want to learn to play the banjo? I’ll show you a little something.” That sharing culture is so ingrained that it feels like a safe space to explore other things without somebody being like, “Oh, no—stay in your lane, kid.”

Bluegrass is also all about playing with other people. In many other genres, people learn more in isolation.

Absolutely. I mean, my husband is a multi-instrumentalist, one of the best that I know. He’s on a different unicorn scale, where he’s so proficient on mandolin, guitar, banjo, dobro, fiddle. I’ve mostly stuck to mandolin and guitar. You really wouldn’t want to hear me play fiddle. I did play a little bit of fiddle as a kid, just because grannies loved it on both sides of my family and, you know, people back around Tennessee love some good fiddle playing.

Has guitar become more connected with songwriting for you?

A little bit. I’ve started using mandolin or octave mandolin more and more over the years to write, but guitar is kind of the ultimate instrument to write on. Some people say piano is that, but I don’t play any piano. There’s something so familiar with the sound of the guitar. It’s in every style of music. You don’t play something on the guitar and automatically feel locked in one place or genre, and that’s the beauty of it. So naturally, it ends up being a tool that I use a lot for writing.

You play a good amount of guitar on A Tip Toe High Wire. Is there a particular reason?

Sometimes, if guitar is the tool I’m writing with, the main hooks of the songs become ingrained. With the song “Boom,” for example, that opening riff and groove was something I had been playing around with on the guitar and then adapted to mandolin. If you come see us play this song live, Shaun Richardson, who’s an incredible guitarist that I get to travel with, plays the acoustic parts, but he played electric on the recording. It felt natural for me to play the [acoustic guitar] part in the studio, because that is the way it was written.

The same thing with “Spitfire,” which is very much built around the lyric as a storytelling song. Sometimes, as the singer, there’s a connection you have to guitar as the main support and driver of a song that’s different than what the mandolin can do. Mandolin can have that role on certain songs—like on this record, “Let’s Go” was totally written on mandolin. But on something like “Spitfire,” “Redbird,” or “Truth Be Told,” I’m playing one of the guitars, and also went back and added mandolin.

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.

Are you easily able to adjust to the scale and size of, say, a dreadnought?

I’ve developed a tremendous amount of reach with my fingers from starting so young. Somewhere in my adulthood, I realized that my resting position on my hand looks like this [holds up fretting hand, and her fourth finger spreads far from the others]. You see how my pinky just does that? It’s like a good yoga move for the finger. I swear, it’s from so many years of stretching, since childhood.

And my pinky is one of my strongest fingers. Some people I know don’t need to use their pinky as much, so it gets a backseat. But for me, it’s in full use constantly when I’m playing, because I have small hands. I think because of that, it doesn’t feel crazy for me to get around on a dreadnought anymore. I have a tremendous amount of reach and dexterity with my pinky, as much as my ring finger.

On the new record, I understand you used a different tuning on mandolin on “Come Out of My Blues.” Can you explain what you did?

I was just playing around changing strings one day and stumbled across this tuning. I call it a split tuning, because on mandolin, you’ve got two E strings, two A, two D, two G, and we think of [each pair] like a single string. Even though we have the eight strings, we treat them like four.

And again, there’s only so many things you can make happen with those four strings, right? You only get four notes per chord voicing, sometimes even doubling the same note. So I’ve played around a lot on the octave mandolin with tuning the pairs of strings separately. On this particular song, one E is down to D and the other E is down to a low A—really tuned down [for an overall tuning of GG DD AA DA, also with a capo at the second fret]. So you’re getting this split two notes rather than the unison note you normally would get. It adds a bit of a funky texture.

Bill Monroe had a tune called “Get Up John” where he would have the strings split like that, and another one called “Last Days on Earth” that was even more so leaning into this tuning thing. Every now and then you’ll hear a mandolin player do it, but not much, probably because it’s harder to do live—to split the strings and tune back. It’s not like going into dropped D on the guitar and tuning it back. It’s a little more painful than that [laughs], but really fun when I can have a second mandolin along and actually play it that way.

Do you explore alternate tunings on guitar at all?

A little bit. If I’m home, I love messing around and seeing what I can get into. I like Joni Mitchell and the way those open tunings can sound. Growing up such a big Alison Krauss and Union Station fan, you know, Ron Block uses a good bit of open tunings on guitar on those albums. I’ve always loved that big, open sound.

You do so much collaboration—playing in bands or sitting in with all kinds of artists at festivals. How do you like looser jam situations, where you jump in and figure it out on the fly?

It’s super fun. I’ve done so much of it at this point, and as bluegrassers, that’s a skill you’re taught early on, because there’s so much improvisation built around the music. There’s a real love for the structure and the tradition, and there’s such a high emphasis on dexterity and how to play your instrument. Even as a singer, you learn how to sing harmony quickly. I feel like those are skills that the bluegrass world gave me that give a good foundation to go elsewhere and understand where things are at on my instrument, and how to open up from there. That spirit of spontaneity in collaboration is one of my favorite things.

To switch gears, you co-wrote many of the songs on this album. Is there a typical role you fall into with co-writing, or does that just vary by song?

It varies per song. There oftentimes are ideas that I’ll carry around for a while, and either I won’t have made time to really sit down and follow through, or I will sit down and I’m just not getting anywhere. I’m somebody who’s constantly grabbing little seeds, and I live a very busy life traveling all the time. So I find it hard to write as much as I would like to when I’m constantly on the move. I do my best writing when I can have time to be still for a little bit, which is more rare for me, because I’m not good at sitting still.

So I’ll have a big list of ideas on my phone. Thank God for voice memos. Equally so, I write tons of lyrics down, almost like poetry or just lyrical ideas that mean something to me and maybe have no melody attached to them. I find with co-writing, that’s a good time to go, OK, what undeveloped ideas do I have sitting around that we can explore?

Most every song on this record started from something that I had in the works with a lyric idea or a melodic idea, and then was able to have someone bring other great ideas to the table to finish it. Sometimes you get surprised because they’ll write something that you wouldn’t have thought of on your own. That’s the beauty of putting two minds together.

You recorded this album at different studios over the course of several years. Why did it work out that way?

Well, we had started workshopping some of these songs I had written. “Boom” was one of the first things we recorded for this record, and it was on the heels of the first year or so of this band playing together. I felt like there was something special happening with this particular group of musicians.

This is my first independent release. I’ve spent my whole career on Rounder Records up until this point. I signed with them when I was 13, and when my contract was up, I just felt like, I need a minute because I’m not 13 anymore. I’m in a way different place in my life. I need to reassess—what do the next ten or so years look like for me?

I felt like I could go ahead and start working on something, whether it became a single or a full record. I just felt like, hey, I’m enjoying making this music with this group of people. Let’s capture it while the magic is there.

So you were just collecting tracks as you went and eventually decided they all fit together as an album?

My thought was that I’ll just go ahead and record some music with no questions asked, just book the sessions myself and not have to worry about when a label wants to release my next thing, if they want to put out a single, or whatever. Maybe I’ll shop this record to someone, or maybe it’ll end up being a full album that I put out myself. It was nice not to worry about that part too much and go, let me just make some music.

You mentioned signing with Rounder at 13. You’re still young, but you’ve been doing this for a bunch of years. What are some things you’re able to do now, as a songwriter, player, or bandleader, that feel different than what you’ve done in the past?

I think that every little step of the way you’re learning something. Part of the beauty of having started so young and having several albums under my belt is I’ve learned through each process of making a record. I can go in having more of an idea of what I want things to sound like, and who can help me achieve that.

You know, the record is called A Tip Toe High Wire.There’s a song called “Spitfire” that the lyric is pulled from. But that [phrase] made so much sense to me, because there is a certain amount of stepping out into this new, scary place, and trying to balance it with the traditional world I grew up in and still have such love and reverence for. That will forever be ingrained in what I do, but also I’m someone who is constantly being put in all these different styles of music. There’s so much to learn and be excited about, these little inspirational seeds from every collaboration and project that then, inevitably, I bring back to my own thing.

There’s a person in me who loves high-energy, somewhat intricate instrumental music, but also at the heart of it, I’m a singer-songwriter who just loves a good, simple song. In the bluegrass world, the picking is all about the shred, but also there are amazing harmonies, and it’s about the song and the simplicity and the power of three chords. So I’m trying to balance all those things and step out in independence in some ways for the first time.

What She Plays

Sierra Hull uses two Bourgeois guitars: a D LSH large-soundhole dreadnought, with a torrefied Adirondack spruce top and Madagascar rosewood back and sides, on which she plays the main rhythm part on “Boom” on A Tip Toe High Wire; and a smaller body L-DBO heard on “Spitfire,” “Redbird,” and “Truth Be Told.” The L-DBO, built with a torrefied Adirondack spruce top and sinker mahogany, was luthier Dana Bourgeois’ personal guitar—the company didn’t have any L-DBO models in stock at the time Hull was looking at guitars, so he let her take his own and built another for himself.

Both of Hull’s guitars have L.R. Baggs pickups: an Anthem in the dreadnought and a Lyric in the L-DBO. 

Her mandolin is a 2009 Gibson Master Model with a K&K Twin Internal pickup. “I got it new in 2009, and I’ve played it at just about every show I’ve done since then, which is a long time with how many miles I’ve logged,” she says. “A lot of people look at it and think I’m playing a Loar because it looks quite old.” 

This fall, Hull became the first female artist with a signature Gibson mandolin, as the company introduced the Sierra Hull F-5 Master Model and F-5G.

For octave mandolin, she most often plays a Weber F-style custom-made for her when she was about 19, which now has a K&K Big Twin Internal pickup. She also sometimes uses a Bourgeois A-style, or a Clark with an archtop guitar body style.

For all her instruments, Hull uses Neumann MCM 114 clip-on condenser mics in conjunction with the pickups. Everything runs through Grace FELiX preamps, which allow her to send separate channels for the pickup and mic. 

She uses D’Addario XS extended life strings on both guitar and mandolin, BlueChip TD55 picks, and Elliott and G7th capos. —JPR

This article originally appeared in the November/December 2025 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.