Br1ck wrote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Br1ck
A good setup (on mandolin) is about three times more important than for guitar. And forget all you know from your fretting hand guitar experience.
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I agree, even though I feel that any prior stringed instrument experience makes learning other stringed instruments easier.
But, yes, because everything on a mandolin is so small, any slight change in the string height and bridge placement has an outsized effect on the instrument's tone and playability. When I was using my "Sumi-era" Kentucky KM-604 A model mandolin onstage, I used to get it dialed in and re-intonated every six months: when the snow came to stay here up in Alaska, then six months later when the snow was gone to stay.
It makes a big difference, because the crown of an arched top mandolin will get higher when the wood swells a little bit from the humidity of spring and summer, and lower when the humidity of winter dries things out a little bit.
That not only affects the playing action, but it also changes the tone to a remarkable degree.
LJ, I actually starting learning mandolin considerably earlier than I did guitar. My first instrument was mountain dulcimer, and once I started getting good on that I took up mandolin, with a crappy all-plywood Harmony mandolin factory reject that I put some hardware on and strung up. Then my godmother gave me the Larson Brothers mandolin she had bought new as a teenager in Joliet, Illinois in the late 1920's, and that was a much more rewarding instrument to learn on, as you might imagine.
I was starting to get fairly good on mandolin when I went to see an outdoor concert put on by the Kansas City Parks & Recreation department, in my hometown of KC. It was the Lester Flatt bluegrass band, with a juvenile Marty Stuart playing mandolin:
Marty Stuart playing with Lester Flatt
He was twelve but he's so small (and still is small) that he looked like he was about seven. And he totally
tore up that mandolin fretboard.
I saw that and saw no hope that I could
ever be even as remotely as good as he was, and that was so discouraging that I put the mandolin away and didn't touch it again for three or four years.
Which was stupid of me, but budding musicians can easily get discouraged at times.
But because my godmother had given me the mandolin and it was, in that sense, a family heirloom, I held onto it and eventually returned to playing it. Thank goodness I held onto it, because when I was ready to return to mandolin it was ready and waiting.
I won't bore you with my further mandolin acquisitions, but around the year 2000 or 2001 I was given another mandolin that proved to be life-changing - it turned out to be an extremely rare National wood-bodied resonator mandolin made a year or two before WWII.
It didn't have any brand name on the headstock, but it clearly had National hardware on it. When I talked to Don Young, the then-president and co-owner of National Reso-Phonic Guitars, he got very excited and told me that the mandolin I was having restored was an extremely rare model, one of only about a dozen ever made.
He then asked me that once the restoration was finished whether I'd be willing to send it down to them at the National factory so they could study it, because they had been wanting to market a mandolin. "We'll give you one of the new ones if we end up yours as the basis for the new model," he said.
So to make a long story short, I became the primary consultant on their mandolin development process, and a convert to playing resonator mandolins instead of the wooden archtop mandolins I used to use onstage and still own and play at home.
Here's the mandolin that National and I came up with:
National Reso-Phonic RM-1 Mandolin
I'm the primary reason that it has a strong Art Deco aesthetic to it. Don and Mac, the two owners of the company, were going another direction with its appearance when I said: "National was making all these great Art Deco-inspired instruments, especially in the 1930's.
That's the look you should be using." They realized that I'd made a good point, and that's why the RM-1 looks the way it does.
These current resonator mandolins are not only loud, but have a beautiful tone when they're in a wooden body (as opposed to the metal body resonator mandolins, which in my opinion sound like a galvanized steel trashcan being kicked down six flights of stairs...)
The coolest thing about my National mandolins, I feel, is the slight reverb effect and the sustain on them, which lasts far longer than it can on archtop mandolins. Since I lead a church music group, this gives me the ability to phrase the melodies of the songs we sing in a very vocal-like way.
So that's the road less traveled, but it's a useful one for those of us who aren't strictly playing bluegrass music and need those qualities I've just described.
Hope that makes sense.
Wade Hampton Miller