I've hesitated often about making this thread: above all else in this world, man should strive to be appropriate to his environment. We shouldn't dream of dragging scuba gear to the Sahara or playing chess with an elephant; and it is the height of folly to expect the ATM to file one's tax return. Likewise, I wonder if the monster I'm attempting to love would FIT IN here.
Let me pre-amble: I've never owned nor touched (though thanks to the members of this forum I have seen and heard) a true, taxonomic-ally correct mandocello. I've been fortunate to possess and to be possessed by an Eastman MDC-805 and a fine Crafted Dammann, but both of these, I think, would be considered "bastards" by a dictionary purist. They possess bodies more akin to archtop or flat-body guitars, respectively; though they do possess the blood to count them as fitting siblings of the legitimate members of the mondoloncello family, even if at weddings and reunions they are delegated to the tables at the far end of the hall with distant cousins, young children, those without pedigree...
I've built this all up too fancifully, I apologize; though not without purpose. Definitions are, first and foremost, (as much as meta-physicians may wish to dream), human construct: the bleeding of fingers, pens, lead; the ephemeral workings of hidden brain folds striking against the "real" like a mallet. And the words and ideas we come to know are their echoes. So it's with hesitation, the fear of pain against the body of thought, that I ask:
Is a 12 string guitar tuned to Robert Fripp's "New Standard Tuning" fitting fodder for the CBOM forums?
THE ORIGIN: Guitars are so facile and commonplace that the phrase "dime a dozen," granted a little bit of inflation, certainly carries the ring of truth. In fact, you can tap their composite bodies and hear semi-metallic sounds. More exotic instruments, on the other hand, float heavenly above this paradigm. You're in luck if you think you can buy a mandocello you wouldn't have to think twice about smashing on stage to get the crowd going. Last I checked (just now), Goldtone mandocellos are selling for $850. To brag about picking up one of these out of the Amazon would elicit a passive-aggressive irony; jeers of "give us the nitty gritty, show us what it's like on the wrong side of the tracks," like humoring the natives. Yet it's a perfectly reasonable cost for a mid-range acoustic guitar.
THE QUESTION: Is a mandocello its cost? I'm not gonna lie. Every time I walk out the door with my Four Thousand Dollar Dammann I feel like a jerk. If I were a musician I can't imagine enough music to justify the cost. How many hearts I'd have to ring, in however many drunken hazes they half remember the feeling. Wouldn't it be great, if mandocellos were so common you could grab one from a newspaper vending machine, heck, why not steal an extra for a friend, and not feel guilty?
THE FACT: In the mid 1980s, when Lead Guitarist for King Crimson, Robert Fripp, began advocating for a style of tuning called "New Standard Tuning," people thought he was just being cheeky. With those fifths instead of fourths, he was literally turning those tabs on their heads, upside down, ya dig. Little did they realize the purity of his intent, the harmonic resonance: I'm sure the theory egg-heads could back me up, I've given up understanding. What I know is that the fifth is pure, it's automatic, it's the drone note; it's the tender vittles in the dark night. No wonder the orchestra strings, and the folk instruments, the very mando-family adopt this way of putting the fingers in their places.
THE SONG: So for $200 I got myself a nice twelve string tuned to New Standard Tuning. What this means is I've unlocked the full range of the mandocello, the 12 string guitar, AND MORE. Sure, we've got octaves instead of unions for the first four courses, but if you get a duo on the same instrument you've got a mando and more. This is the tentacled thing we've all been asking for... Something to crash against the slithering things on-stage unseen by the audience, guilt free.
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