a fine addition to the family.

On Friday I picked up the mandolin from Gryphon Strings, and wow, it's a peach of an instrument. They did a bunch of stuff that good luthiers can do:

• Add buttons for a shoulder strap.
• Lower the string height ("action"), at both the nut and the bridge.
• File down the edges of the frets so they're smooth with the side of the neck/fingerboard.
• Fix the intonation--essentially the ability to play in tune along the entire length of the string--by not only moving the bridge (and marking its place so I can put it back myself), but also by doing some fancy filing of the saddle grooves in the bridge.
• (In a regular mandolin, this function is handled by a "compensated" saddle, like the zig-zag below.)

Instead of a mandolin's standard G-D-A-E tuning, I have it in G-D-A-D, a common tuning for both the octave mandolin and its longer sibling, the Irish bouzouki. I'm finding it's more fun to play that way, and enables the kind of sound and feel that drew me in the first place to this family of "paired strings, but neither a regular mandolin nor a 12-string guitar" instruments.

When I emailed the maker (Stan Pope) to tell him it had made its way to me, and to ask about some pricing not on his website, he wrote back:

Chris - That is a "blast from the past" 

The main changes I have made, are Truss rods in all steel string
instruments, Cross Bracing top and back, brass tailpiece that accepts
ball end strings.

My assessment of my mandolin, which the Gryphon guys agreed with, was that it was an early piece by someone who could go on to do truly great things. Evidently Stan thinks so too.

(In addition to design and mechanics, he's clearly put in the time mastering ornamentation and wood finish.)

Particularly in the harmonic-rich G-D-A-D tuning, it just...sings. Like it wants to help you make music, even if you don't know how. Pretty much the opposite of a good violin, which will help you make music, but only if you know how to play, and it can't be bothered with you otherwise.

Stan's instruments appear to be wildly under-priced. We'll see how much I play the one I have, whether it makes any sense to have him build me one, and if that happens before he retires. Those are problems for another day. Just now, I have to go practice.

a world of musical ambiguity

I have already brought home a hand-crafted...thing. It belongs to an odd family of instruments, which the "mandolin" family. They have paired strings, called "courses," and each course can be unison or an octave apart, and the paired strings give them a full, more multi-dimensional sound with more higher-pitched overtones. Which may not be what you want: 6-string and 12-string guitars are both wonderful, but not, for most of us, interchangeable.

As mentioned previously, some Swedes developed a 5-course instrument that they call a cittern, for no discernible reason. I have discovered that you can actually buy one off the rack, though the Internet's opinion of the Ashbury brand is that it's kind of okay, but if you're halfway serious, it's worth having a luthier build you one. I don't really want to pay $900 for a mediocre instrument, nor do I want to pay $4,000 for a nice one. So much for that.

(Note that Ashbury calls it an "Irish" cittern, again sort of nonsensically because while Swedish musicians do love them some Irish traditional music, I've only seen one or two people play a 5-course instrument who wasn't Swedish.)

So I kept poking around on Craigslist, and this thing shows up, labeled an "Irish cittern."

 

The maker is a real person, using a different shop name now. It's "chunky," in a sense: the neck is square-ish and heavy, the string height farther down the fingerboard is really high, and it feels like the ends of the frets should be rounded off with a file. And it sings, with sustain and harmonics for days. It's clearly a solid early piece by an artist who could go on to make truly great things. Totally worth $140.

Here's what I've learned about these instruments:

• A "mandolin" is very well defined.
• The following instruments have no solid distinctions between them:
• "octave mandolin"
• "mandola"
• "mandocello"
• "cittern"
• "Irish Bouzouki"

People tune them differently, using different weight strings based on the tension the instrument was built to withstand: it's common, especially on longer-scale instruments like the Irish bouzouki or the Swedish cittern, to see people lower their preferred tuning to fits the instrument's strength, then only ever play with a capo that moves the instrument's range above what they could safely crank the strings to. For example, they could tune an instrument to GDAD, but always play with a capo that pitched the strings to DAEA, when trying to tune that high directly would be likely to break strings or damage the instrument.

I will call it an "octave mandolin," because that's what people thought it was when I wandered into the shop with it.

Wikipedia has caught up:

Amongst many luthiers and musicians the Irish bouzouki is considered to be part of the mandolin family, but for others this new family of instruments is a separate development. In actuality, the mandolin and lute families are related and the bouzouki is a part of that. At any rate, since the genesis of the Irish bouzouki in the late 1960s, luthiers have incorporated so many aspects of mandolin construction, particularly when building archtop Irish bouzoukis, that for most it is a moot point.

For many builders and players, the terms "bouzouki", "cittern", and "octave mandolin" are more or less synonymous. The name cittern is often applied to instruments of five courses (ten strings), especially those having a scale length between 20 and 22 inches (500mm and 550mm). They are also occasionally called "10 string bouzoukis" when having a longer scale length. The fifth course is usually either a lowest bass course tuned to C2 or D2 on an instrument with a long scale, or a highest treble course tuned to G4 or A4 on a shorter scale. Luthier Stefan Sobell, who coined the term "cittern" for his modern, mandolin-based instruments, originally used the term for short scale instruments irrespective of the number of their strings, but he now applies "cittern" to all 5 course instruments irrespective of scale length, and "octave mandolin" to all 4 course instruments, leaving out bouzouki entirely.

I'm sitting on our couch and I can see eight (8) stringed instruments, which is a fine number.

I could never dream of such nuance.

One of the many curious things you learn in calculus is that "infinity" is not exactly a single thing: that, yes, a set of things can be infinite, but infinite sets can have different "cardinalities," and with some straightforward (as these things go) math, in some calculus situations you can algebraically cancel out infinities the same way you might cancel out the n in 5n/n. In an ordinary everyday life, you'd never know the difference.

I have learned many subtleties in the world of boring bedtime literature. There are different ways to be boring! And they are not alike.

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

• Here we have sentences, actually quite pithy by later standards, but still of considerable length, which do the reader no favors as s/he tries to untangle where Gibbon has been superseded by actual archeology, where his observations are still illuminating, and where he (unaccountably to modern eyes) suffers as both a scholar and commentator from assuming the Bible is historically accurate and not presenting any good theories as to why the entire ancient world failed to notice the flood of miracles leading up and including the Crucifixion, which encourages in the modern reader the sense that, while our ways of understanding history are always improving, at the very least Gibbon deserved to be supplanted by the slavering hordes of archeology, geology, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, textual criticism, physics, and chemistry.

Moby-Dick

• I hope you're interested in ships, whale biology, and ships that hunted and skinned whales, because there are very, very long and detailed interludes on all that, and more. And others less interesting. Although, there are no ships until 25% through the book. Before that, you're treated to a long-form essay about the pulpit in the Seamans' Chapel. (Not its symbolism or significance. Just the pulpit.)
• An over-indulgent pot-smoker whose rambling self-monologues every so often deliver an hour of genuine brilliance.

Paradise Lost

• It is 3 AM. You have been driving for 17 hours. Jamie wouldn't have called if it weren't a real emergency; you pray to gods you don't believe in that the trouble isn't the cartel again. 
• Hundreds of square miles of corn and soybeans, punctuated by the occasional farmhouse or rest stop.
• Your muscles twitch with accumulated coffee and Adderall, but you are lulled by the metronome thunking of the expansion joints in the pavement.
• Nebraska has come for you.