Out of another place and time
From distant shores by Spirit sent
I speak in colour, move in rhyme
I am my instrument
©1900's from The Player, JJM
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from round-back mandolin to solid-body mandola in three steps
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| It was somewhere in my early teens.
It was hanging on the wall of the shop.
I had to ask what it was, but I could sense a connection with it already.
The round-back mandolin.
It was Old World. It was Art.
With it, my affair with the mandolin began.
As time passed, my taste in music developed along hard rock lines rather than toward traditional mandolin genres. Ensembles combining electric instruments with acoustic, especially acoustic mandolin, shared my enthusiasms with the power trio. I'd have taken up electric guitar except for an entrenched non-conformist attitude and a bit of a coincidence.
Someone had loaned me a Gibson catalog. The allure of the Les Pauls, SGs, and Firebirds might have been too much to resist had it not been for an entry near the end of the mandolin section. The Florentine eight-string solid-body electric mandolin. That instrument was a pivotal discovery. Then not long after, as if to cement the message, Dash Crofts played my town with his Florentine. And it crystallized in my psyche.
Although out of production by then, a slightly used Florentine was finally found.* I sold my motorcycle to buy it and began my trip through garage band culture.
Now for the mandola...
A few things were nagging at me:
First, I was having difficulty with that mandolin in distortion mode because the undertones were constantly going dissonant on me. That was because of its primitive bridge, though at the time I blamed it on four unison pairs.
Second, bending those unison pairs on a fourteen inch scale didn't work all that well for me.
And third, in order to play what I was hearing in my head, I wanted some lower frequencies.
But the die had been cast. I would not take up electric guitar. Pivotal decision.
So I built my first mandola. Tuned a fifth below the mandolin, it had a guitar bridge, four strings, and a wide fretboard. It was an effective instrument. Primitive, but functional. In the extreme, I'd say. On all counts.
It allowed me to explore a lower pitch range as well as techniques and textures available to electric guitarists. But since the mandola is still tuned in fifths, I retained the harmonic relationships of the mandolin. And that's all good.
I've been devoted to the mandola, pursuing my ideal of mandola, ever since.
JJM
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| The Roundback Mandolin |
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| The Gibson Florentine / Jack-in-the-Green |
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| The first MixSon Mandola. Click on the photo to see this one in action. |
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* I had help finding it, of course. See the ...Links page for an appreciation to ye olde local music shoppe, Lipham's.
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