This mandola plays beautifully, credit to the spot-on neck carve, compound-radiused fingerboad and stellar fretwork. Everything you play sounds fuller, more expansive. Playing this mandola next to a mandolin feels like being that bigger kid on the playground, dominating the court. Today their unique sound is associated with musical forms as diverse as jazz, country, folk, bluegrass, classical, and even electric rock.'Shady Grove,' anyone? Excellent-condition Collings MT2 Mandola in very desirable Italian spruce & Birdseye maple just in to the shop! This 2015 build has all the power, punch and clarity of a Collings mandolin, and then some, in a larger body and proportionally longer scale length. Even with the fall of Vaudeville Theater in the 30s, mandolins remained popular. In parlors and theaters across the country, ordinary people gravitated toward the reinvented instrument for evening entertainment. A mandolin (Italian: mandolino pronounced mandolino literally small mandola). There are also the rarer mandocello (CGDA) and mandobass (EADG). In the early 20th century, as vaudeville and jazz became popular music forms, Gibson remade the mandolin as an American pastime by flattening the back, curving the neck, adding a fingerboard, and other innovations to make it easy to learn. Click on this line to return to the World of Musical Instruments page. The mandolin is the most common and is tuned like the fiddle, GDAE, its big brother, the mandola, is tuned like the viola, CGDA, and the octave mandola which has no violin equivalent is tuned GDAE. When the round-backed variety was introduced to the scene, a musician and manufacturer named Orville Gibson made significant changes to modernize the relic. Fifteenth century Italy saw the rise of the Mandola, Italian for “almond,” the direct ancestor of the Mandolin.Ĭenturies later, Italians brought their beloved instrument to America in the first and second wave of immigration in the 1830s and 1880s, respectively. Many European countries adapted this simplest chordophone, adding strings, frets, lengthening or shortening the strings, and changing the body’s shape. Mesopotamia originated a hollowed wood bowl with strings called the Oud, meaning “wood”.

Many stages of evolution changed the mandolin from an ancient lute to a modern American folk instrument. Some variations on the mandolin are the mandola, tuned a fifth lower, the mandobass tuned like an upright bass, and the mandocello, tuned an entire octave below the mandolin. Mandolin strings are tuned in unison and differ from the next pair by a fifth of a note. The distance and tautness between those anchor points determines the tone. In chordophones, strings made of wire or sinews are suspended between two end points. Mandolins are tuned like violins, since their pairs of strings correlate with the four strings of the smaller instrument. The mandolin, and its neighboring mandola and bouzoukis, qualify as citterns because they are plucked with a plectrum like a guitar’s pick, rather than played with a bow like a violin. The sound of chordophone instruments comes from vibrating strings. Mandolas Italian Market - Arbor Trails Listen Mandolas Italian Market - Arbor Trails. As part of the chordophone family, the mandolin is a specific kind of lute. A stringed musical instrument, commonly used in folk music. A mandolin has eight strings, arranged in four pairs, and a rounded wood shell.

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