Mysterious mandolin family instrument
 

I happened to come across this video by a young YouTuber named Sarah Jarosz. She's got a good voice, and a couple of high end musical instruments in view: there's a Collings guitar on a stand behind her, and she's playing what took me a minute to realize is an octave mandolin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAcu5g8AMEs

Here's a picture of her playing it onstage. She's got her clip on tuner covering the logo, dag nabbit!


It's clearly a high quality instrument; it's got a Monteleone mandolin family tailpiece on it, which I have on a few of my mandolins. But search as I might, I still haven't caught a glimpse of the headstock logo.

There's a good possibility that it was built by Fletcher Brock, who builds magnificent archtops, mandolins and other mandolin family instruments. He uses a similar art deco adornment on some of his headstocks, and this looks like one of his.

As it happened, I met Fletcher at the first Healdsburg Guitar Festival I attended in 2001, and actually watched his booth for him while he disappeared for a meal and, apparently, a ˙ L O N G ˙ stroll around the grounds. Nice guy, terrific builder, but not a gung ho sales guy, not in the slightest.

For those of you old enough to remember the late 1960's, his mother is Alice Brock, the Alice of "Alice's Restaurant" fame.

Anyway, while this instrument might be a Brock, I'm just curious as to whether any of you all can spot what it actually is.

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can give me on this.


Wade Hampton Miller

PS: The alert among us will notice that there's a Collings F-5 style mandolin behind her onstage, too. I wish that I had had such fine instruments when I was gigging out at her age!!

Hey, that's cool - no Marxist-Leninist working class resentment here. If you can afford fine instruments, you might as well use them.

I think it's a Northfield Archtop Octave Mandolin
https://www.northfieldinstruments.co...ctave-mandolin
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/c...eg?format=750w

It could be, but from what I can see of the headstock logo underneath the tuner on her instrument, it doesn't seem to match.

Yours:


Hers:


But you could be right, I don't know.

Thanks,


whm

Yeah, that's a different one for sure.

A forum participant named Jofari just posted in the identical thread that I started in the general discussion forum that my guess is correct, it was made by Fletcher Brock. I was hoping to get a definitive answer to my question reasonably soon, but was surprised and delighted that I got an instantaneous answer!

That’s so cool....

So do any of you all have any experiences with Fletcher Brock’s beautiful instruments? I saw the ones he had at Healdsburg, of course, but didn’t want to play them in his absence - when he left me stranded at his booth, after 45 minutes or so a friend of his came by and I asked him to take over. I never did see or talk to Fletcher again; for the remaining two or three days of the festival he was never at his booth any time I walked by.

Which was both annoying and disappointing, because I had been contemplating the idea of having him build an instrument for me. But while I know he didn’t intend his extended absence as a deliberate slap in the face, that was the impact of his behavior, nonetheless.

I assume he’s shy and hates talking to the public. But some warning ahead of time would have been nice...

‘Nuff said.

I also happened to see a great string band from out of state one day a few years later: they were playing in a corner of a remote rural roadhouse out on the Kenai Peninsula one day when I just happened by. They were playing this great high level stuff, while the locals were mostly ignoring them, though not in a truculent way. I didn’t catch the group’s name, which was stupid of me, because they were excellent musicians.

One of the guys had what I thought was a Brock octave mandolin, and when I talked to him on their break he confirmed that.

I asked: “What are you guys doing up here? Did you have a few paying gigs scheduled and wanted to play a few more to get free food and beer while you were still up here?”

He laughed and said: “Exactly!”

I put a twenty dollar bill in their tip jar, and didn’t even ask to play his Brock mandolin, as much as I might have wanted to. But I know how much I dislike it whenever strangers come up to me at gigs and try to talk me into that, so I didn’t ask.

Anyway, thanks again for responding.


Wade Hampton Miller

Sarah Jarosz is hardly a just a “young Youtuber”. She’s a multiple Grammy winning musician who released her first album (which also led to her first Grammy nom) in 2009. She’s an acclaimed songwriter, singer, and instrumentalist who is frequently featured on “Live from Here” with Chris Theile. She deserves considerably more respect than you seem to be giving her.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Jarosz

Mike, I’m sorry if I offended you by the tone of my posts; I had never heard of her before today. I’ve gotten not only the responses in the threads but quite a few offline emails from friends bringing me up to speed on this remarkable young woman.

(Edit: unnecessary reply to Mike deleted.)

Short version: yes, I was unaware of her prior to today, but it wasn’t out of maliciousness or condescension that I wrote about her. You folks in the Lower 48 sometimes don’t realize the distance and geographical isolation that we have to endure here on the Alaskan subcontinent, but the exposure that non-mainstream musical artists get up here is woefully inadequate. It costs more to fly to Alaska from the Lower 48 than it does to fly to Europe, and the nearest major city to us is Seattle.

Not many acoustic acts make it up here unless their airfare gets covered, and with the Alaskan economy in freefall there are fewer and fewer of those gigs.

Seattle’s a 3 hour flight away. By direct contrast, the flight I took from Anchorage to Magadan, Russian Far East when I played a music tour there in Magadan Oblast was a mere hour and a half.

So, yes, we’re considerably closer to Siberia than we are to Seattle.

You should count your blessings that you have constant exposure to touring musical artists where you live, because 99% of the time we do not.

We’re a world away from you, in more ways than one.

Hope that makes more sense.


Wade Hampton Miller

PS: If you think I’m being pretentious by calling Alaska a subcontinent, look at Alaska on a globe some time, rather than one of those flat little maps where they stick Alaska in a reduced size down in the lower left hand corner. You’ll see that I’m not exaggerating in the slightest about the distances involved.

Price air fare prices too, while you’re at it. You’ll find that if anything I under-emphasized the distances involved.

Fretboard Journal interview with Brock (2014):

https://www.fretboardjournal.com/col...letcher-brock/

Sierra Hull
 

On her website Sierra Hull does a beautiful version of John Prine’s SUMMER’S END. She’s a Berkeley music school graduate and mandolin is her main instrument. She’s playing a similar instrument in the video.

Don't worry Wade you did not say "just" which was "just" imagination, and given both of my kids are older than she, I would indeed call her "young" also .and she is on Youtube so you're good
I'm in Wyoming and had not heard or her until your post .

Boy I know what you mean about the size of Alaska I've been there 2 times, once Fly Fishing on Kodiak and then flew to Anchorage to overnight then to Petropavlovsk Kamchatka .
People here stateside usually don't get the distances involved.


Here is an interesting map overlay for some perspective .

https://i.imgur.com/8AhjZKt.gif

Sarah is a wonderful singer and musician. I particularly like her take on Annabelle Lee. She has a cool banjo for clawhammer. I've never looked it up but it looks custom.

https://youtu.be/P_ElaY97FVI

Her collaboration with Aeife O'Donovan and Sara Watkins, I'm With Her, is just stunning. I believe they all have conservatory music educations, gained after they all were successful in various musical endeavors. I mean, who goes to school after selling millions of records with Nickle Creek? Sara Watkins, I guess.

One of my favorites, Mandolin Orange is unknown among my peers. And I figure you have to be doing pretty well to buy a Loar mandolin.

Wade,

I'm glad at least a few more folks have now heard of Sarah Jarosz, thanks to you. Check out the recordings and Youtube videos with the "I'm With Her" trio. I was fortunate to see them live. Oh my!! Living in the lower 48 has some advantages I guess.

Back in 2013 I purchased an octave mandolin, partly inspired by her talented playing. You would think it would be an easy instrument to learn for a well rounded guitar player. I struggled to incorporate it, and eventually gave it up. I do still have my Collings MT mandolin, but I only play it once in a while. People like Sarah Jarosz make it look easy to be really good on multiple instruments. It's not!

Svea

Hi Wade, got your PM, thanks. It wasn't a matter of personal offense - you didn't owe me an apology.

Living in another (not quite so) huge state, your geography lesson brought back memories of relatives flying in from the east coast back when I was a kid, growing up in the SF Bay Area. My folks would ask them what they wanted to do the next day, and more than once, they'd answer "go to Disneyland", not understanding that it would be an all-day trip just to get there from where we lived. They'd say, "but it's in California, isn't it?" They couldn't quite wrap their heads around how big the state is compared to where they came from.

We're all very fortunate that the internet affords us access to all of the wonderful artists, young and old, that it does, not to mention forums like this where we can share them with kindred spirits, wherever they may be. :)

Thanks, Dave - I'm a huge fan of The Fretboard Journal (FBJ) and intend to keep my subscription to it current until the day I die. It's really a wonderful publication.

To those of you who haven't read FBJ or never heard of it, it's really a superb magazine. A lot of the coverage is of quirky, non-mainstream musicians, music and musical instruments, but for me that's a lot of its appeal. More mainstream musical subjects get covered in every issue, too, but unlike virtually every other guitar-oriented publication I'm aware of, the more offbeat material doesn't get ignored or hidden in a spot where no one's likely to read it.

Plus, I've discovered that attractive members of the opposite sex swoon and fall instantly in love with you when you're an FBJ reader. Without you even mentioning that you read it.

That's if you're heterosexual, of course. If you're gay, it's good-looking members of your own gender that get drawn like moths to the flame whenever you come strolling by.

The folks in their newsroom don't like to advertise that, because they don't want people subscribing for that reason alone. If you were to call their office and ask publisher Jason Verlinde, he'd even deny it! But he doesn't want that information leaking out for fear of being deluged by troglodytes, peckerwoods and nitwits.

But the Fretboard Journal is an equal opportunity sexual attractant, trust me on that...

Hope this helps!


Wade Hampton "Of Course I'm Not Making This Up!" Miller

Mike wrote:

Mike, as I mentioned to you in the last PM I sent, what I do whenever anyone seems offended or angry over something I've written is immediately go read through some of their posts from other threads, so I can try to determine the sort of personality the other person has.

Just briefly skimming through another person's posts can give you a fairly reliable snapshot of their personality, or at least the personality of the public persona that they want to project.

When someone is an egotistical blowhard, it's easy to see that right away (says the man who's been accused of that more than once.) When they're strident, aggressive, dismissive and quick to see insults when none are intended, that shows up.

One of the more difficult online personality types is what I call "the last honest man" syndrome, where the guy is being a jerk because only he - and he alone - is brave enough to tell the truth. Everyone who disagrees with him about anything must be cravenly trying to win approval from some indeterminate powers that be.

There was a guy like that on the UseNet acoustic guitar newsgroup rec.music.makers.guitar.acoustic. Watching that guy foam at the mouth (so to speak) got SO tiresome, because no matter what anyone else said about anything, they were frontin' for the MAN, and our hero was the only one who wasn't blind and could discern the true path that everyone else should be taking.

Naturally he developed an intense dislike for me, because I wouldn't sing harmony and hum along to be a back up band for his fictions and stilted, profoundly misanthropic views.

Once I wrote a post describing a visit I'd made to the late, great music store Mandolin Brothers in Staten Island. They had the biggest selection of acoustic archtop guitars I'd ever SEEN. In that post I described how the Strombergs sounded when I played them, compared to the Gibsons and how both of those compared to the Epiphones.

He told me I was full of the four letter word we don't use on this forum. Because Strombergs sound THIS way and Gibsons sound THAT way and I was completely wrong about what I claimed I'd heard.

Because, clearly, I had sinister ulterior motives and was deliberately misleading all the poor innocent lambs on the newsgroup.

Mind you, he'd never played ANY of the guitars I mentioned, and admitted as much. But he'd read a book or magazine column by George Gruhn about these instruments that described their characteristics, and I'd gotten it wrong.

Because we've got such dedicated moderators on this forum, that extreme sort of online grandstanding is minimized. (Thank you thank you thank you thank you.) But no matter what you do, some folks just have that sort of congenital disdain leaking from all their pores, and - astonishingly - some of them are fairly intelligent people who know just what they can get away with. So they'll sometimes take things right to the very limit of what the moderators here will tolerate, and feel that they're being clever and triumphant when they do.

That's not you, Mike, or me or any of the genuine contributors to this forum. The droids I've described are actually pretty rare on this forum because - being contemptuous of others by sheer reflex - they dislike what they see as the petty restrictions keeping them from having their fun.

I'm just delighted that those guys are the minority here, though, and that the vast, overwhelming majority of participants on this forum are sincere, pleasant, knowledgeable and often downright hilarious contributors and part of a truly enriching exchange of information.

So thank you ALL for that.

To finish this post, I want to say that I don't care much for writing or reading posts that are more about forum mores and behavior than about the core subjects we've come here to discuss. Those posts are generally tedious and self-important, and who cares, anyway?

I definitely include my own posts on the subject in that description.

But I do think it's worth mentioning how positive and fulfilling the online culture of this particular forum really is, which is why I've written this enormous doorstop of a post.


-



-



Okay, so it's a virtual doorstop for a virtual door...

Anyway, I hope you all will forgive my rambling at such length, but because this forum does give so much back to us in terms of a feeling of community with our shared interests that I think it's helpful to stop every once and awhile and say that out loud.

Or type it out loud, as the case may be. It's a blessing, in every sense of the word.

This forum has done so much to keep my spirits up as they can be during this catastrophically depressing pandemic that I just needed to say as much.

Thanks again for providing such a great forum JR. You too, Kerbie and Tom and all the other even-tempered moderators who keep this forum so readable and enjoyable.


Wade Hampton Miller

I enjoy reading FBJ, but I think I must be doing something wrong, somehow.
:( :confused:

D.H.

Well, I guess I won't be subscribing to FBJ, because I've already had trouble keeping the women at bay. Why, every time I go to the park with my 6 mo. old grand daughter, they are attracted to me like flies on you know what.

This makes me chuckle...

Me too. I have had a bit of a crush on this woman for quite some time now. That is indeed a fletcher brock OM she plays. And she's inspired me to search for an archtop octave.
Unfortunatly I couldnt go the 4 g's it takes to
Purchase a north field or a FBOM . And there isnt a whole lot of archtops (if any)that fill that 1000-2000 dollar range. So i bought one of these.Mine is a A 1956 Gibson tg-50. Which is a tenor guitar. My initial idea was to drill the headstock and switch out the tailpiece.
But I liked the instrument so much I left it alone. This is not me in the video.
The scale length is right around 23 in
There are several tunings one can use.
"Irish tuning" is OM.
If you play mandolin it's a small learning
Curve to up the scale length and make that
reach work. I've had alot of fun with it.
It's very well made and plays great all up and down the neck. Only thing I did was drill out
The endpin and installed a JJB. Sounds great plugged in. With a new HSC.. About 1100 invested.

That’s a glorious example of a tenor archtop, Var. Very cool 😎


whm

Hey Wade...have you come across Sierra Hull yet? Another young lady who is a monster mando player (and is now starting to play guitar) singer and songwriter. Its great to see some of these young gals stepping forward. Sierra has the potential to make it big....

Sierra Hull and Molly Tuttle together is magical. Both could outplay 95% when they were 12.

Hi Wade

Is it possible that Sarah’s octave mandola/bouzouki family instrument is a ‘Nugget’? Tim O’Brien plays a similar instrument made by ‘Nugget’ & also a mandolin by the same maker but if memory serves me correct his instrument has no scratch plate.

Cheers

Slim

Hi again Wade

Please disregard my last post about the Nugget. According to the internet Sarah plays a Fletcher Brock as you surmised.
Good spot!

Cheers

Slim

In addition to which, I don’t think the gentleman who builds or built Nugget mandolins is currently active.

We’d have to check with the folks at mandolincafe.com to find out for certain, but that’s definitely the impression I’ve received.


whm

Here you go CoolCats.
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...71d338d321.png

I saw her playing this first on one of the 2013 transatlantic session videos - or maybe it was this one, don't quite remember.



There's quite a few videos of her playing it, and I even saw her playing it with I'm With Her when they came to my town.

I fell in love with it's sound so much, but I'm not a mando player at all. As it's similar to an archtop it sent me down yet another guitar rabbit hole and I came out with a Loar lh-700. No, it's not the same but that's where I ended up.

Anyway, its a stunning instrument, she's an amazing artist.