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(FWIW, there is a good number of people who play irish/scottish/english on 5-string "bluegrass/old-time" banjos, with good effect. leprechauns care not a zit about how many strings you have, as long...

shop by weight. mandolin == light, banjo == heavy. makes a difference when playing standing up and when carrying it around.

"A Rising Star of Italian Violin Making Is a 32-Year-Old From South Korea. As a teenager in South Korea, Ayoung An decided to become a violin maker. Her journey eventually took her to Cremona, Italy,...

you can also get mandocello string sets from emando, he is a member here,
https://emando.com/shop/strings_cello.htm

and yes, I know about the Marcy Marxer Cello Banjo, when she was in town with a...

most likely, Martin Jonas and I have the similar (if not the same) model MC-815 Suzuki-Nagoya Japanese mandocello. (https://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/members/3046-Martin-Jonas, watch his wonderful...

Olga Egorova https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WBEE-X-xH8

welcome to the mandolin cafe! this is the right place to ask all mandolin questions, even the silly ones. as to finding a teacher, this is no easy ticket. well, it's easier for a beginner. you want...

"fiddle tune ... at a jam". making mistakes while playing at a jam is the normal, not the exception. ideally you play through the mistakes, but if you completely bomb out, just wait for the tune to...

"coordination between left and right hand, the pick hitting the string at the same time as the finger hits the fret". timing of the pick is of course cast in stone by the up-down pendulum motion of...

(cannot resist such a straight lead). "flying unruly fingers?" - well, play fast and you will have no time to flail them about. works for me. chicken and egg? make it work for you! but yes, there is...

in the other thread is the movie from the gibson factory, movie has a short segment where they install the frets. chop, chop, chop style, impressive, very industrial.

"I have two inexpensive humidity gauges". as the man had said, "never measure anything twice". you need 3 (or 5) gauges with majority voting in case one or more sensors are faulty. remember the 737...

cool project. went to check if you have Buddy Merriam's Monteleone, sure thing, you have it! here is the man himself in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yybK_gRQvA4

"bad habits" - playing fast ensures you have none. like running a sprint ensures you have no broken legs, you know how to walk correctly, you have the right shoes and you eat the right stuff for...

gah! honey, I shrunk Mike Marshall! that's a beastly machine with amazing tone. pete, thanks for posting it!

i just recently went through a machine-shop worth if allen keys until i found one (1) that fits my truss rod exactly. i wish makers would stick to metric sizes. the matching key was a metric 9/64...

you can put shims under the bridge to make it taller. plastic credit card material is popular for this, widely available and you can cut it with normal scissors. pile up as many of them as needed...

"the beat is slightly in front of them". that's right, I am told that for Irish music, fiddle should be slightly ahead of the beat. as result, guitar/drum are slightly behind the beat. the best...

i, too, hesitate in recommending a new person on an uninhabited island to make "no undo" work on their brand new mandolin.

but as a rookie fret-worker with no previous experience, I can describe...

numbers, man, numbers! are your too-fast fiddlers puttering along at 90 bpm or rocketing at 120 bpm? for a mandolinist, it's a big difference between the two. pedestrian technique and boil-the-frog...

"ideal X" is the proverbial spherical horse in vacuum, a simplification that allow simple computations yield results "close enough" to the real thing.

they are not necessarily good things. ideal...

a related question, did anybody do/publish force-stress analysis of bowl backs? for example, I was recently surprised to discover that bowl-back cant top wants to go up, not down like archtops and...

these days distinction between OM and Irish bouzouki is more marketing (GDAE/GDAD, octave/unison, high/low action, colour of strap, size of pick are all player preferences/customizations). the real...

"dead area at both ends of a vibrating string". this is the difference between an ideal string and a real string. ideal string has no stiffness and can bend at sharp (unphysical) angle at the...

I learned the version from the Fiddler's Fakebook verbatim, then listened to 100 youtube videos, F.F.'s version is pretty much identical to Kenny Bakers recordings, I can play along with all the...