It's Not Just for Bluegrass Anymore....

The mandolin is a member of the lute family (plucked ot strummed stringed instruments).

As it is known today, the mandolin is has eight strings arranged in four courses. It has a tailpiece and floating bridge. The scale length (vibrating length of an open string), is approximately 13 inches. The two strings in each course are normally tuned to the same note and played together, though a very few experimenters have done otherwise. Each course is commonly called a string even though it's really two. The standard tuning is exactly the same as that of the violin - GDAE, low to high.

The mandolin developed from predecessor instruments in the latter half of the 18th century. From this time until the end of the 19th century the instrument was built in a manner similar to the lute, with a flat top and a back composed of curved staves. This form is still made today, but has lost a great deal of popularity (except among classical players).

At the close of the 19th century, Orville Gibson developed a new mandolin construction method based on the violin. It had a carved top and back (in fact, in Gibson's original model the back and sides were carved as a unit). The scale was lengthened from 13" to 13 7/8"--the difference being the approximate total width of the frets. He founded the "Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Co., Limited" in 1902, though he lost control of the company not long after. They manufactured two main lines of mandolins: the F style with fancy scrolls and points, and the plainer, oval-bodied A style. During World War I they also produced an Army-Navy model for sale in PX outlets, which had an oval body and flat, rather than carved, top and back.

Various makers produced copies of these designs, as well as banjo-mandolin hybrids (an abomination combining the worst of the two instruments, in the opinion of the author), as well as other variants. Both Dobro and the National String Instrument Company produced resonator mandolins, though they were too late to market to take advantage of the first wave of popularity that Gibson's instruments produced (see below).

In this section I'll be focusing on America and, to a lesser extent, the British Isles. There are mandolins in the rest of the world, but I just don't know enough about that (right now--I sense an update in the future...).

In the first quarter of the 20th Century, mandolin orchestras were extremely popular. These were usually composed of sections that parallel the strings of a full orchestra--first and sedcond mandolins, mandola and mandocello (occasionally mando-bass as well, but those were rare). This fad was largely driven by teacher-dealers, who sold instruments, taught people to play them and often conducted the orchestras.

Around 1930, the mandolin began to appear in southern string bands. After one of these, the Monroe Brothers, broke up brother Bill formed his own band that became The Blue Grass Boys. This is the band that established the core sound of bluegrass music. Bill Monroe may have even saved the mandolin from obscurity, but his style dominated the perception of mandolin playing for many years.

When I get a chance, I'll be adding profiles of well-known mandolin players, as well as expanding the "Modern" overview above.

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