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Old 10-08-2016, 08:08 PM
Wade Hampton Wade Hampton is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Chugiak, Alaska
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Quote:
Originally Posted by gmr View Post
I am an average joe guitar player. I really find Sarah Jarod and her OM to be such an incredible combination. Unfortunately the market for octave mandolin and mandcellos are a bit past my desire price wise. I just bought one of the new Epiphone Olympic arch tops and I am wondering if this little guitar might be a reasonable candidate for a mandocello or OM conversion project? Which is the better choice for a guitar player to easily adapt?
gmr, I'm not going to comment on whether the scale length of a guitar is too long for an octave mandolin. What I will mention is that the scale length on the mandocellos I've either gigged with or owned - all two of them - is identical to that of a guitar.

The first mandocello I ever had my hands on and got to use onstage was a 1916 Gibson mandocello owned by my former musical partner in an Irish duo. We played in the Irish bars of Chicago and the Midwest, and were always switching off on instruments - my partner was primarily a mandolin player (and a really good one,) but he also played guitar, bodhran drum, mandocello and mandolin-banjo. I played mountain dulcimer, guitar, mandocello and mandolin-banjo. So we kept the musical textures changing all the time.

Decades later, I got a custom-made Weber mandocello and used it for a while, but in the interim I'd commissioned and received a beautiful acoustic baritone guitar, built for me by Roy McAlister. I found that anything I could play on the mandocello I could play more easily on the baritone, with less racing around the fingerboard to reach the notes I needed.

That said, converting archtop guitars to mandocellos is easily done. When I met Todd Phillips, the original bass player for the David Grisman Quintet, I talked about mandocellos with him and he said he'd often converted old archtop guitars to 'cellos. "Did you fill in the holes for the guitar tuners and redrill the headstock to accept mandolin tuners?" I asked him.

He said: "No, the only thing you have to do is replace the nut and re-notch the bridge saddle; I only used single strings for the C and G strings, instead of double courses. Those low strings are pretty "crashy," anyway." When I asked him what he meant by "crashy," Phillips said that they tend to "crash into each other a lot. By using six strings instead of eight on a mandocello you get a cleaner sound."

So that's a fairly inexpensive way to experiment with a mandocello: get a set of mandocello strings, and get a new nut that accepts two double courses for the D and A strings, and single courses for the C and G,

So your string set would look like this:

C G DD AA

Hang onto the original nut and bridge saddle, so if you decide you don't like the mandocello as much as you'd hoped, you can easily return the instrument to its original guitar configuration.

Hope that makes sense.


Wade Hampton Miller
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