Quote:
Originally Posted by Br1ck
Newbies, especially those with cheaper mandolins, they MUST be set up by someone who knows. Even an Eastman, if not bought from a specialty shop like Elderly, Gryphon, or The Mandolin Store, can use some fine tuning. If you don't own an Eastman or Kentucky KM 150 and above, this is extra important.
I bought a closeout Michael Kelly to hone my setup skills on, and I needed to level and crown the frets to get the action right. It ended up pretty good, and I sold it cheap to a student wanting to learn. But I can tell you, I would not have lasted a month if I started on that. Every mandolin I've played in an all purpose music store has been horribly set up. PLEASE, I want you to succeed.
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This reminds me of the Michael Kelly F-style octave mandolin I bought some years ago. I gave up playing it after a while because it was so hard to play. It shouldn't have been because I had already been playing mandolin for several years. Several years later I learned set up skills and found that the action was way off, the relief was way off, and the string spacing on the nut was all over the map within courses and between courses. It looked like the slots were located by eye by someone who had too much to drink. I went back and set the action and relief and made a new nut and it became playable. Still not a great sounding instrument, but a decent first try at an octave mandolin.