mandolin shopping
Apr. 25th, 2003 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jfbI have two mandolins. One's an Espanola--a brand that, as far as I can tell, barely exists--with a buzzy A string that I bought in a pawn shop for $69. The other's a Gibson A-1 from 1915. It cost a lot more than $69, but surprisingly little for an 88-year-old Gibson mandolin. It's got some wear and tear on it, and looks like it, but it sounds glorious, even when I play it.
Neither one of them plugs in. I like playing the Gibson through a microphone--because, as above, it sounds great. But I'd like to be able to move around when I play, and not worry about keeping the instrument at a fixed distance from and attitude to the microphone. So I've been wanting a mandolin with a pickup.
I have an acoustic guitar and I had a pickup installed in it. They attached a tiny microphone somehow to the inside of the body, and drilled a hole in the bottom of the guitar to fit the piece that you actually plug into. This is fine--I've got no problem with drilling a hole in the guitar. But I didn't want anyone touching the 1915 Gibson. Never mind the property value--if something goes wrong, there's one less 1915 Gibson in the world, right? I couldn't have that on my conscience.
So I've been slowly shopping for a new mandolin. My plan was either to get a mandolin with a pickup already installed, or to get a decent but not great acoustic mandolin, one that I wouldn't mind having carpentry done to.
Last weekend I went to Starving Musician in Santa Cruz, just because I was in the neighborhood. They had the weirdest thing on the wall: a metal-body resonator mandolin. I'd never seen one before, so of course I had to play it, and man, it was amazing. Felt really good, and sounded like ringing a bell. And cheap, too. But not electric. And I didn't know if it was even possible to rig up a pickup with a metal-body instrument.
So Tuesday I went to Gryphon Stringed Instruments and asked them about it. Sure, no problem. Highlander makes a whole set of pickups for resonator guitars, and surely one of them can be adapted for the mandolin. Drove down to Santa Cruz again (I had to get down that way to see a concert anyway), played the resonator mandolin for like half an hour, bought it.
Wednesday I tried it out in real life--no gig planned, so I took it to an open mike and tested it there, playing my own solo stuff and accompanying friends. Three things went wrong:
- My mandolin strap snapped in the middle of the third song. (I caught the mandolin with my arm and somehow kept playing.) A metal body is heavy, as any robot can tell you. But okay, buy a stronger strap.
- It seemed to have trouble staying in tune. Could be because I was still using the strings they'd had on it at the store--who knows how long those had been getting abused by randoms like me. Okay, get new strings.
- The resonator gives the instrument a lot of interesting harmonic overtones--in particular, a strange whistling noise on the middle-upper notes. It follows the pitch you're playing, so it just adds a different tone to it, a tone which was really cool when I was playing melodic lines on other people's songs... but really distracting when the mandolin had to carry the chordal structure of my songs. No obvious way to "fix" this--it seems like it's part of the basic character of the instrument.
So Thursday I drove down to Santa Cruz again to take advantage of the two-day return policy. A sad day. All the other mandolins at Starving Musician were cheap and bad, but I had finally remembered to look up the other instrument stores in Santa Cruz, so I went to More Music, a small but very cool store with a lot of vintage instruments and an informed and enthusiastic staff, one of whom tried to tell me my mandolin quest was misguided, but I didn't get it. I played a bunch of mandolins, including a 1960s Gibson electric, a strange mandolin shaped like a tiny acoustic guitar, and a newish Tacoma, but didn't find anything I loved.
So I went to Sylvan Music, which is much larger, has dozens of mostly new mandolins of various shapes and sizes, and most importantly had a guy who wouldn't let me stop him from explaining a fact I had completely missed.
The standard pickup for mandolins is not a tiny microphone that has to be attached somehow to the inside of the body, and a hole drilled through the side for the wires to run through. It is a replacement bridge.
The bridge is the piece that the strings run over--in most mandolins, including mine, it isn't attached to the instrument at all, but is held in place by the tension of the strings. So to install the pickup, you don't have to damage the instrument in any way--you just loosen the strings, pick up the bridge, put on the new bridge, and put on a new set of strings. The pickup gets sound directly from the strings that run over it. You then run a little wire to a piece that clamps onto the side of the mandolin, sort of like a violin chin rest.
So in conclusion, I am a big stupidhead, but I am now a big stupidhead who knows he can add a pickup to his beloved Gibson without fear or guilt. I get to keep playing this great instrument, and I save the expense of buying a new mandolin, and the time and stress of finding the right one.
I win!
Mandolin pick up
I enjoyed reading the whole story though.
Kristina