The following information from Dave Richardson in "Music and Song from
The Boys of the Lough" (1977):
A few years ago on a trip to Chesterfield, I met an instrument-maker called Gerald Short and was very taken with the sound of a mandola he had made. However the tuning of it was not suitable for playing traditional music in standard keys, so I asked him if he could make an instrument of this type with the scale length of a tenor banjo, which I was currently playing tuned an octave below the fiddle...
To exploit and increase the sustain and also to get a fuller sound, I began experimenting with tunings. Stefan Sobell had shown me a tuning in which you drop the top string a tone to get GDAD instead of GDAE. This enables you to use the top string as a drone in the keys of G and D and gives you the chance to get full chords with the bulk of the strings unfretted--all of which enriches the sound of the instrument...
Eventually I decided to do away with the low G or bass string. It was fine when playing in G but a bit of menace when in D. ...
Also, even in the key of G it could make the instrument sound bass heavy if you kept striking it as a drone ... so I replaced it with a D of the same weight as the first string, giving me a D drone to use in the same way as the 1st string had been used. This had the advantage that it could be sounded even when the 1st string was fretted and in use and also it was a suitable drone string for the keys of both D and G. In addition I lightened the quality of the paired D or 3rd strings by making one of them an octave higher, i.e. the same D as the 1st strings. Thus the final tuning arrived at was:
4th D'D'
3rd D D'
2nd A A
1st D'D'
This was the tuning I used in nearly all the work with the group.
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