We're having some drama with J's Angry Biodad--you might call it The Great Drama™, in its scope, and the years of its anticipation. It's one of those dramas where one does well to prepare for physical conflict, hoping to avoid it, and yet violence would eliminate the shadows and interpretations where gaslighting can operate. Perhaps, once on the other side, we can have a party and raffle off the extra pepper spray we no longer feel we need.
We are all coping in our respective ways. Improbably or not, mine involves putting energy and effort into musical instruments that I mostly haven't in the past, especially--get this--practicing. There's the ongoing battle of wills with the violin, but there's the octave mandolin, and the regular mandolin, and I've even been picking up the guitar a bit more, although it's awkward because it's not tuned in fifths, and one of the reasons I decided to jump on the mandolin as well as the violin is that my left fingers have never liked spanning the long distances of the guitar.
I had an electric guitar for a long time, a lovely Fender Stratocaster that might now be worth more than I paid for it (it had a rosewood fingerboard, now a premium feature due to conservation issues). I never really learned to play it, though. The electric guitar has six strings and the same tuning, but that's about where the similarities end: it's a radically different instrument.
Luckily for me, people have been making electric mandolins for a long time. Not a lot of electric mandolins, mind you. You're not going to just walk into Guitar Center (or anywhere else) and pick one up. There's only ever been a double handful of "mass"-production models, and only about a handful now. The extremely-niche website emando.com can help you find a used one, or a willing/experienced luthier (anyone who's built a solid-body guitar could build you a solid-body mandolin, if they want to, but they have to earn a living and might not want the bother).
I decided to start small, with the only solid-body mandolin kit on the market. I used to fantasize about building an electric guitar from parts, and this seems like a low-friction, low-cost path to the mandolin equivalent. If it sticks, maybe I'll get a nicer one, or just upgrade the kit.
Fender and Gibson both made electric mandolins, and Fender re-issued theirs a while back:
I decided to buy a mandolin. My octave mandolin has been really useful for learning fiddle tunes, as I can experiment and play with understanding the melody without having to deal with the dozen other things I have to do right on the fiddle to produce a tolerable sound. The octave mandolin is huge, though, about the same scale length (vibrating length of string, from the nut down to the bridge) as my guitar (648mm or so), compared to the violin's 327mm. My new mandolin is probably typical at just over 352mm, so the notes (and hence the fingerings) are much closer. My first violin teacher told me the fingerings were the same, but it was a while before I realized she meant it literally, in terms of where you actually put your fingers.
(Big Muddy Mandolins will make you a mandolin in violin scale, so if you're a good enough violinist I guess you can play like this. I can play my Suzuki violin pieces easily enough.)
Mandolins come in a handful of shapes, and unlike the violin, which has barely changed in the past 400 years, the story of the instrument itself is a fun romp through musical history. They started out in the bowlback mini-lute form, which is what composers like Vivaldi wrote concerti for. Eventually people experimented with carved tops and backs like the violin/viol families have; F-holes instead of open (round, oval, whatever) soundholes; flat tops and backs; and all kinds of variations and mashups. Instruments vary so widely among components, wood quality, and simple luthier skill, that it can be tricky to generalize, but maybe the best you can do is this guy who plays the same music on mandolins from the three major categories:
The rules of thumb, including some visits to music stores and playing a bunch:
A bowlback is not at all what I want.
Flat-topped mandolins are often full and boomy with lots of sustain, like my octave mandolin. This can leave melody lines a little muddy.
Open soundholes tend to cut through less than F-holes.
The F-style ("Florentine," ironically unrelated to whether it has F-shaped soundholes), which I call "the kind with all the squiggly bits" for the sake of conversation, is considerably more expensive (30-50% more for the one I bought) than its teardrop-shaped A-style siblings, because the squiggly bits take a lot more work to make.
The F-style can sound a bit different, but nowhere near 30% different.
You may need an F-style if you want to be taken seriously as a professional bluegrass musician, just for appearances.
Internet prices are the same as shop prices.
After I did all the reading, I kept an eye on Craigslist, and went to the neighborhood music shop, where Anna's ukuleles came from. They had two (2) mandolins, which were educational, but not nice. It turns out that while I am not a good enough violinist to distinguish between a half dozen violins at a given price point, I first picked up a guitar decades ago, and fretted instruments are absolutely something I know about. And I'm good enough at them to be pretty picky about how they sound and play, especially the neck shape, which you just can't feel until you get your hands on it.
Next stop was the world-class--literally, they have an international reputation--Gryphon Stringed Instruments. They escalate pretty quickly into the multi-thousand dollar price range, but they do have a handful of lesser models, including some Eastman mandolins. I liked how they played, but the MD304 (oval soundhole) was a little quiet, and the MD315 (squiggly-style) was $220 more, and...really, I'd rather that money be spent on nicer wood. Gryphon didn't have the MD305 (A-style, F-hole), and didn't know when they'd get them, owing to trade disruptions with China. Elderly, a Midwest shop that does a big mail-order business, also doesn't have them, so who knows.
I remembered that Santa Cruz has some good music stores, so I carefully called ahead to Sylvan Music and determined that they had enough of a selection to make it worth the hour-long drive. They actually had even more than I thought, a whole row of sub-$1200 instruments, so after dismissing the cheap ones, I spent an hour playing up and down the handful of Eastmans, including the MD515 (squiggly) and MD505 (non-squiggly). The winner was the MD505, and they had a variant the Internet hadn't told me about, the MD505-N/CC. This not only had the "vintage" finish I liked--avoiding the sunburst finishes which trend pretty garish on even the nicest mandolins--but they skipped the white "binding" to round the edges and make it more comfortable to play, and which makes it look even more understated.
It's an absolutely lovely instrument, a perfect example of how instrument quality has increased over the past 40 years even as prices have decreased (in real terms). Even 20 years ago I don't think you could have gotten this good a deal. Globalization certainly has its share of discontents, but I can't regret how accessible it's made genuinely good musical instruments.
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