Mandolin

A mandolin is a small, plucked, stringed musical instrument, descended from the mandora. It is characterized by: more...

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• Eight strings in four pairs (courses), normally tuned to the tones g, d', a', and e" (like the violin), that are plucked with a plectrum,
• A body with a teardrop-shaped soundtable (i.e. face), or one that is essentially oval in shape,
• A neck with a flat (or slightly radiused) fretted fingerboard, and a flat nut and bridge,
• Tuning pegs inserted through the back of the neck's head, or machined metal gears and pins in lieu of the pegs,
• A soundtable with a soundhole, or f-shaped soundholes, that are open and not latticed.

In Indian classical music and Indian light music, the mandolin is likely to be tuned to E-B-E-B. As there is no concept of absolute pitch in Indian Classical music, any convenient tuning maintaining the relative pitch between the strings to E-B-E-B can be used.

Some guitarists tune a mandolin in fourths, the same as the bottom four guitar strings (E-A-D-G) or the top four guitar strings (D-G-B-E) allowing the same fingerings as a guitar.

Like the guitar, the mandolin has relatively poor sustain; that is, the volume of a plucked string decays quickly. A note cannot be maintained for an arbitrary length of time as with a bowed note on a violin. Its small size and higher pitch makes this problem more severe than with the guitar, and the use of tremolo (rapid picking of one or more pairs of strings) is often used to create a sustained note or chords. This technique works particularly well with a mandolin's paired strings, where one of the pair is sounding while the other is being struck by the pick, giving a more rounded sound than a single coursed instrument can.

Mandolin forms

Mandolins come in several forms. The Neapolitan style, known as a round-back or bowl-back, (or tater-back or tater-bug, colloquial American), has a vaulted back made of a number of strips of wood in a bowl formation, similar to a lute, and usually a canted, two-plane, uncarved top. The Portuguese, a flat-back style, is derived from the cittern. Another form has a banjo-style body.

Other variants include the Howe-Orme guitar-shaped mandolin (manufactured by the Elias Howe Company between 1897 and roughly 1920), which featured a cylindrical bulge along the top from fingerboard end to tailpiece, and the Vega mando-lute (more commonly called a cylinder-back mandolin manufactured by the Vega Company between 1913 and roughly 1927), which had a similar longitudinal bulge but on the back rather than the front of the instrument.

In the early twentieth century, another new mandolin-style, with carved top and back construction inspired by violin family instruments, began to supplant the European-style bowl-back instruments, especially in the United States. This new style is credited to mandolins designed and built by Orville Gibson who founded the Gibson company in 1902. Gibson mandolins evolved into two families: the Florentine or F-style, which has a scroll near the neck and two points on the lower body; and the A-style, which is pear shaped and has no points. These styles generally have either two f-shaped soundholes like a violin, or an oval sound hole directly under the strings. Naturally, there is much variation among makers, and different styles exist as well, but these are the most common. The Gibson F-hole F5-style mandolins are considered the most typical and traditional for playing American Bluegrass music, while the A-style is generally more appropriate for Irish, folk, or classical music. The differences are more than cosmetic or aesthetic since the F5-style model is usually built to take much heavier strings and is consequently louder and "punchier" than the A-style model, making it more suited to the hard-driving percussive sound typical of bluegrass music.

Read more at Wikipedia.org