custom mandola

[sunburst]

The braces are pretty standard tone bars. The string gauges that are working pretty well are very close to EJ76 (I was unable to get EJ76s so I used individual strings). The owner thinks it needs a little heavier A strings, and perhaps one or two others will need to be a little heavier, but not much.

[Skip Kelley]

John, that is an amazing looking mandola! A real work of art!!!

[Tom Cook]

John, that is an amazing looking mandola! A real work of art!!!

Tom Cook here. I am the lucky owner/custodian of this wonderful instrument. It looks, feels, sounds and plays GREAT. I play mandola in the Harrisburg Mandolin Ensemble although I am actually a BG mandolin player. I tried 5 other mandolas ( Weber, Gibson, Collings, Eastman and Flatiron(s)) and didn't like any of them. They all had too big a scale for my small hands ( even the Gibson at 15 3/4) and all sounded more like a lute than a mandolin. Maybe they are supposed to; but I'm used to a mando feel and they just didn't do it. ( The Martin was the closest at 15 1/2 but the band didn't care for the wimpy flat top sound)So my buddy Wade Yankey suggested I contact John Hamlett which I did and presto, here I am like a kid opening the train set under the Christmas tree. This instrument is awesome and sounds, well, like a great mandolin but with more thoughtful tone. Come see it at opening night of the Classical Mandolin Society in November in King of Prussia, PA. Hey all of you out there, John Hamlett is the real deal and you should consider yourselves lucky if you have one of his instruments.

[Tom Cook]

And, by the way, it looks great from 50' away. I wanted a 1930s jazz guitar vibe and I sure got it. Its lovely. ( I look better from 100 feet away)

[Bernie Daniel]

Beautiful instrument! Stunning really.

I'm devoted to block inlays also and the all the white-black contrasts on this one kind of make me think piano for some odd reason. It is a great looking mandola.

Is the bridge actually canted or is that an illusion? I ask this because the saddle already looks compensated.

In theory I guess the mandola saddle compensation should be different than the pattern on a mandolin (back forward back forward) as it only has one course of plain strings -- so back forward forward back (going C to A)?

Did you go with black wood because of the ebony scarcity -- or do you prefer it?

added: I guess looking at your first post I realize the bridged is probably intentionally slanted -- as you were concerned about the f-hole points. So I'll rephrase the question. Why does a mandola require both a compensated AND a tilted bridge?

[sunburst]

...Why does a mandola require both a compensated AND a tilted bridge?

Answer: because it does.
That is what it took to get the thing playing in tune, and I figure in tune is the important thing, and if the bridge is a little "crooked", so be it. One thing; the shorter the scale, the more intonation errors because of different string gauges, so the shorter the scale, the more compensation needed. This is a Cumberland Acoustics bridge, and the built-in compensation was pretty close, but each instrument; different scale lengths, different string gauges, different action height etc. will require slightly different compensation. This one plays in tune like this.

I bought some African blackwood fingerboard blanks from a vendor out of curiosity and to experiment, and I used one on this mandola just to see what it was like. I like ebony much better as far as working the wood, but the blackwood seems to be very friendly for fretting. Assuming it holds up well, and I have no reason to suspect otherwise, it should perform just as well as ebony in use. With large block inlays, there is a tendency for the fingerboard wood to chip between the edge of the inlay cavity and the fret slot because there is what amounts to a little ridge of end grain wood sticking up there. This wood showed good strength there, so perhaps it is a good choice for fingerboards with block inlays

[Bernie Daniel]

OK thanks but let me take this a bit further. Is is hard to tell from the pic but I assume the C, G and D courses are wound strings and the A course is plain? That is the usual mandola string set.

So it seems to me, based on analogy with a mandolin saddle compensation that in theory anyway the compensation on a mandola saddle should be:

C (back, i.e. longest string) ; G forward of C, shorter string); D even more forward, and finally the A course should be back again(that is longer then D and many G also).

This is based on the assumption that plain strings have be longer than wound strings of the same gauge?

The bridge on your mandola does not follow that pattern suggested above. Why are the mandolin and mandola compensation patterns so different?

With a mandocello (all courses wound) the compensation is linear C longest to A shortest.

[sunburst]

First of all, the pictures are misleading. The first set of strings I tried did not have wound D strings. Those did not work well at all, but I took some pictures with those strings still on the mandola. The strings it left here with have wound D strings. I didn't spend any particular time analyzing what was going on at the bridge, I just checked the intonation on each string, and I made some adjustments of the bridge top to get all the strings in tune at the 12th fret. That might change slightly when Tom (the owner) experiments with string gauges, but he probably wont adjust more than a gauge or two, so it should all stay pretty well in tune.
I assume the core diameter of the wound strings and the gauge of the un-wound strings determine the string lengths, but I really don't care to get too analytical about it. It's in tune. I could make a custom bridge top that would not need the slight "tilt" of the bridge, I suppose, but I almost always have to tilt bridges a little bit on mandolins and mandolas, or any floating bridge instrument.
Bottom line, I just want it to play in tune and whatever it takes to do that is OK by me.

[Bernie Daniel]

Ok I understand your thinking and what works works.

But I do not think my last post was clear so a made a diagram -- it is hard to "draw" with the forum format. The "mandola theory" is what I reason the compensation on a mandola should be based on a mandolin compensation. But the CA saddle on John's mandola is much different.

I am sure Steve has made many mandola bridges in the past and knows that this is the proper arrangement - not questioning that. I'm just wondering why the logic does not hold.

Anyway it is off topic and not all that important.