Hi mighty All,
I'm going to ask your advice about choosing right instrument (I know, this is quite subjective, but still)
I've started to play mandolin 2 years ago, and shortly after that I was lucky enough to join local (Moscow) bluegrass band. It was great time and I like how mandolin fits the bluegrass music. After a while I moved to another place, and at the moment I'm mostly play irish traditional music (which I used to play even before mandolin on harmonica/concertina, but now I'm also using mandolin for that). While mandolin can sound quite nice in session settings (our session is not the noisiest one I've been at), I feel that banjo or octave mandolin could suite irish music better (and we have 2 more mandolin players already). So I started to search information about octave mandolins, and to get the feeling I've retuned 4 middle strings on my small Yamaha guitar to GDAe tuning. I thought that after trying the tuning a bit I'll decide if I like the tuning (and I do like it) and if it will be too hard to have additional stretch compared to mandolin (not really). But as a side I also got 'I want a tenor guitar' disease.
My thought's were - our session is quiet enough, so I could play tunes on guitar instead of banjo and still be heard, I could use tenor guitar as octave mandolin for backing, I could probably even fingerpick slow tunes, and it could be also nice timbre addition to the session. I always liked the sound of guitar in irish music (Masters of Irish Guitar is one of my favourite ITM albums).
I also like old instruments, especially ones from early 1900. It's like having 2 things in one - you can play it and it's also a piece of history. I've started to search around, first thought of course was to check old Martins, but they're quite expensive and also usually have 23'' scale length, which seems a bit too long for me (scale length on my Yamaha is ~21''). So after not so short search, I've found the instruments that I like in every way - short scale, old ones, not extremely high priced, nice sound (based on clips I've found), 12-fret body - 1920s Regal Tenor guitar.
All these things considered, I'm thinking about starting a hunt for one of these old Regal Tenor from 20s. There's some info about them here on cafe, I've read a couple of reviews on antebelluminstruments (1, 2), the sound clips are close to what I'd like to get. If I'm going this way, I'd really like to get one of the Professional ones (like couple of Regals here), although I'm not sure if it possible to easily find one.
So what do you think?
Do you have any advice about that? Am I missing some points? If I'm not, probably places where I can search for these guitars, may be even some stores I could call/check in Europe/UK or some friends of yours have a Regal in their closets?
Just for fun, I'll put here small practice video of a nice reel I've got from Angelina Carberry recording
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