A friend of mine recently bought a mandolin (no brand name) and kept breaking high E strings while trying to tune so he brought the mandolin for me to check out. As soon as I took it out of the case, I noticed it looked almost large enough to be a mandola, which could explain why strings are breaking. I measured the scale length, it's around 15 inches. My mandolin is around 14, and my mandola is 16, so it's in between them. I think it's too short to put mandola strings on, so I'm tuning it down a whole step to F so he can play it. My question is, what would be the optimum pitch for this scale length using a standard light set of mandolin strings? Is FCGD good, or should I maybe go even lower?
Seth
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