music adventures.

I've been giving the guitar a break this year, since the muscles it uses interfere with the muscles I need to strengthen for the violin. I can get away with mandolins, it seems, and they're both fun and practical--stop laughing, I can hear you from here--because the near-universal tuning for an ordinary mandolin is the same as a violin, G-D-A-E, and the fingering distances are pretty close as well. I use them to help learn violin music, because they remove that extra challenge of the violin where I do not automatically know if I am playing the note I am intending to play.

The exception to the mandolin tuning is the instrument I have that I always think of as an "octave mandolin," which--bear with me here--is tuned an octave below a regular mandolin. But here we get into murky territory. The length of an instrument string that vibrates is the "scale length," and there's physics connecting the scale length, the mass of the string, and the pitches that string can ever produce when plucked, plus the engineering constraint that the string can't vibrate so much it hits the fingerboard. ("How good it sounds" also involves physics, but not in the kind of predictable way that everyone can agree on.)

I think of mine as an octave mandolin...except, I was looking around recently, and the usual octave mandolin scale length is 21-22", like the ones from Red Valley Mandolins. Mine is 23.5", and the guy who built it calls it an Irish Bouzouki. Sure, except everyone else's Irish bouzoukis have a scale length around 25-26"; again, like Red Valley's. Bouzouki tuning varies, but G-D-A-D is common, and empirically, that's one sweet spot where my mystery instrument makes its best music. G-D-G-D is also really nice; G-D-A-E produces all kinds of dodgy harmonics and twangs.

(There is an instrument with a 17"-19" scale length, tuned C-G-D-A in between a mandolin and everything else. Hilariously, we call this a "mandola," and so do Europeans, which is fine except that many Europeans call the octave mandolin an "octave mandola," even though it is an octave below the mandolin, not the mandola. Just to clear that up.)

You'll notice that these all have 4 pairs ("courses") of strings and are sort of agnostic about how they're tuned. Swedish music introduced me to the plucked instrument in this video, which has 5 courses and is generally shaped the same as the 4-course things above.

History gets a little murky in spots here, but amidst the folk revivals of the 70s and 80s, everyone realized guitar/mandolin makers were underemployed, and started commissioning custom instruments. Over on the guitar side, Pat Metheny asked Canadian luthier Linda Manzer to make him something "with as many strings as possible," giving him the Pikasso:

That had never been done before, because, honestly, why would you? It's harder to build than it is to play, and that's saying something: given the problem of supporting massive string tension but leaving a wooden soundboard free to vibrate, pianos solve it with a frame made of cast iron. But Manzer nailed it, and is the undisputed master of the form.

For any random instrument, there's always at least one person able and excited to play it, and over in Mandolin-land, luthier Stefan Sobell made what are basically large 5-course mandolin siblings. The Renaissance cittern was different, having 4 courses with 9 strings (one course has 3 strings), but the string count was similar, and over the course of a decade it became clear that more people were playing the modern instrument, and Sobell called it a "cittern." To the extent there's any consensus, modern citterns have a scale length of 21"-26", but the truth is, it's all so fuzzy that it's best to label them all "CBOMs": Citterns, Bouzoukis, Octave Mandolins.