Many dialects are spoken in Marshall, Michigan, all of them musical — English, Chinese, Japanese, bluegrass, old time, choro, jazz ...
Rochester, N.Y. native Adrian Bagale co-founded the Marshall-based Northfield Mandolins with acoustic designer Kosuke Kyomori and workshop manager Zhang Xi Sheng a decade ago, strongly believing, at least from the builder's perspective, in Longfellow's supposition of a "universal language." Bagale, a dedicated player who gigs occasionally, brought with him plentiful experience in the mandolin world, including stints with Elderly Instruments and Saga Music (which distributes Kentucky mandolins, Blueridge guitars and Gold Star banjos among many other products). He met Kyomori and Xi Sheng through those channels, on frequent overseas trips to oversee bringing Asian-made mandolins stateside.
As part of the process the three men learned economies of scale. They learned what worked, and what didn't. And they learned that they all wanted to channel their passions into making "lifetime" instruments.
Ten years on, Northfield, which began its commercial life with direct sales, is finding its niche by tweaking tradition with popular instruments like its brawnily-dimensioned Big Mon and its mahogany- and maple-backed Archtop Octave Mandolins. All are made, played and inspected in a crosstalk between shops in Marshall and Qingdao, China.
The guitar-bodied octave was dreamt up by Bagale and company after noticing a trend — particularly on Mandolin Cafe — towards tenor guitars. Based in large part on high-peaked Martin archtops of the 1930s (the bodies of which also served as the basis for the legendary Nazareth company's modern M series), the octave is finding a home with buyers shifting from tenors as well as those inspired by players like Tim O'Brien, Joe K. Walsh and Sarah Jarosz (whose similarly styled Fletcher Brock octave almost singlehandedly launched a craze).
Others like Walsh have also joined the Northfield bandwagon, and the brand has a strong artist roster including Mike Marshall, Adam Steffey and Emory Lester.
Here, Bagale discusses what's coming down the pike next for Northfield.
About the author: Roots scholar and multi-instrumentalist Michael Eck is a respected songwriter; a nationally exhibited painter; and an award-winning cultural critic and freelance writer. He is also a member of Ramblin Jug Stompers, Lost Radio Rounders, Berkshire Ramblers and Good Things.
Yes, we are launching three new mandolins, and all will be made in the Michigan shops. We're doing a flat top octave, a budget model we're calling The Calhoun, named after the county where our shop is located, and our most remarkable F-5 yet which doesn't yet have an official name or price. This is all so new we're still a few making final decisions. The Calhoun and the Flat Top Octave have the names they'll keep and their prices on our web site.
You road-tested a prototype of the new octave with Roger Tallroth from Väsen — what did he think of it?
I'm really into Scandinavian folk music, especially Swedish stuff. Väsen is one of my favorite bands of all time, and Roger is one of my heroes.
We were just about done with two prototypes last summer, and we got them finished for the annual Marshall Mandolin Summit to get some feedback from people around here. We then immediately drove one down to Kentucky, where Roger was playing, and he fell in love with it.
He gave us all sorts of varied tuning possibilities and so forth and got us thinking about different ways to refine the instrument. We tweaked a couple things and then met back up in February at Wintergrass and handed it to him. He immediately used it. He gave us a big thumbs up, so we came back and set out to develop it further, to make the jigs and fixtures and to make a batch. We have the first few done right now. It's just a really cool instrument.
It's a distinct design from the archtop octave, yes?
It's based on a tenor guitar body frame, but we've done a lot of things to improve the ergonomics, especially for the right arm. We basically built the neck angle into the joint and into the radius of the top, which allowed us to do a sort of reverse taper on the body. Typically, guitars taper as they go towards the heel — this has a slimmer end pin area. It allows you to get around better, it's almost like a built in armrest without there being an armrest. You can get it closer to your body, and that makes it friendlier to play. It's a really big sounding instrument for how small it is, and very minimally appointed.
And you're tooling up for a budget mandolin?
Keeping with that theme of widening the audience, we have developed an entry-level instrument called "The Calhoun." We call it entry level only because it will be the beginning of our product line. It might not be considered entry level in terms of its price point, which is sub-$1000.
What makes it different from the rest of the Northfield line?
We decided to do our version of a pancake or Army-Navy mandolin, another flat top instrument. Lots of things are different about this one. It's pretty counterintuitive even in terms of the general operating procedure, making the least expensive instrument in the United States and the most expensive instrument in China. We are definitely going against the grain there.
When it gets down into the lower price point, if there just isn't anything you can buy that really works well, that sounds good and has the backing of the professional musician crowd, I think that's unfortunate.
Tell us more about the instrument.
The idea with The Calhoun, as with the new octave, is to do a couple of things differently. It's a tried and true design, but with tweaks to its bracing pattern, a radius built into the top, and a real modern day approach to things like neck shape, neck heel, truss rods and so forth. It will have a radiused board, the right types of frets, an adjustable bridge, tail pieces that aren't those clam shell things — you know, all these things that made Flatirons and Gibsons really hard to play in tune and to keep together.
Is it shaped like the classic pancake?
Ours is more like the shape of our teardrop A5 style instruments, although we don't make a traditional A. They are oval holed, not round holed. As I mentioned, they have some different things about them, like an elevated fingerboard, so it's not just glued flat to the top. They have a more Selmer-style heel shape, and a different sort of mortise and tenon joint, so that you can access that elevated fingerboard and not run right into a neck heel. All these things are meant to make the instrument more easily playable and not sacrifice tone. They also have kind of a reversed A or H brace inside and a cast tailpiece. And we're looking at some pickguards and armrests and things you can do to trick them out.
Appointments?
It's really stripped down. It's important that they sonically have good characteristics. We're going to make sure that all the joinery is flawless, and not cover it all up with a bunch of adornments that don't make the instrument sound good or play good.
If we're going to try to make this instrument in this country, and we're going to try to make it affordable, then we have to make it out of materials that are sustainable and easy for us to get. It won't have ebony boards, and rosewood this and that, and all these tropical hardwoods that are practically extinct from not being sustainable anymore. We can't get lost in all those sort of traditional specs that would make the mandolin unaffordable, unsustainable, and, from an environmental standpoint, just kind of bad news.
Northfield's Artist Series, which you designed with Mike Marshall, is unique in that is available in both two-tonebar and five-tonebar variations. How will the new F5 differ?
There were a couple of recent occasions where Mike was playing in a bluegrass situation or some real hard-driving stuff where he really had to lean on that five-bar instrument. It couldn't keep up. It couldn't give him the headroom that he was used to. It became more obvious that, in that context, the E string and the A string were more important, instead of this really nice resonance in the lower mids. We put ourselves in situations, on purpose, where we felt like the five-bar instrument could potentially underperform. They were the real hard-driving, outdoor or big ensemble concerts, where there were a lot of things competing with those frequencies, especially the mid and low.
We knew that the two-bar was better suited for that bluegrass situation than the five-bar, but still, we wanted to incorporate some of the stuff that we put in to those lower registers. We couldn't have it all. We had to put more emphasis on certain parts of the frequency range in the upper and upper mids, so we tried to approach it that way. One of the things we've done is really hone in on material and properties and use different spruces with different characters.
The five-bar Artist Series, which Marshall frequently plays, is more modern sounding than the new model?
It is a little more versatile in that way. I think that's why it works so well with somebody like Mike, who is playing so many different varieties of music. It became another tool in his arsenal. He's got a lot of different instruments, and it became the go-to tool in all these choro, classical and jazz gigs — all these different things he's doing. But back to that traditional sound, we just knew that a Loar-style F5 carves out a certain sonic space. It's a real laser in terms of the mix.
So, this will be the closest to a straight up Loar you've done?
Yeah. This will be the closest that we've ever done, but there are certain things that we won't do. We're not making flat fingerboards. We're not making the full extension. We're going to employ some of the modern playability aspects that we know professionals prefer. We're not going to put on a stainless steel Gibson-style tailpiece. We're going to use either one of the Nugget tailpieces that we work with, or a James tailpiece, which we've been quite happy with. So, it won't be totally by the book. We're trying different things with coloring, to be able to do something a little bit more like a 1922-style burst, which is a little different, right? It's a little more golden than some of the later '24 bursts and has a different shape in terms of the pattern.
Under the hood it's the most robustly built instrument we've ever made. We've put in every bit of development that we've encountered along the way, and we've built a lot of F5s at this point. We're throwing everything at it. We've had one prototype on the road with Mike for about six months. He's played Wintergrass and Swannanoa with it, and he's been carting it around all over Europe. We've gotten a lot of feedback. We're pretty excited about it.
We desire to make as good an F5 as we possibly can, and we will never stop. We're obsessed. This is a sickness at this point. We're fortunate enough to know at least some of the top shelf grandfathered-in builders and we've watched them return back to really specific parameters with the F5, regarding what it can do and why it works so well in a bluegrass context; why Bill Monroe decided to play one. That's really important, but we also feel privileged to know that we are making an F5 the way we want to, and we're 30 minutes away from Kalamazoo, where it all began.
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