A mandolin is a musical instrument that belongs to the lute family meaning that it can either be plucked or strummed. It is a direct descendant of a instrument called the Mandore, which is a soprano member of the same family. The mandolin instrument has a body that possesses a teardrop shaped soundboard, though it may also possess a soundboard that is essentially oval in shape, possessing either a single sound hole or multiple sound holes of varying shapes. These sound holes tend to be open and completely lacking in decoration, unlike the Baroque era mandolins which were decorated with an intricately carved grille.

The original mandolin design had six different double courses of gut strings, and these were tuned in a similar way to how lutes were tuned. The original intention here was for the strings to be plucked using the fingertips. Today on the other hand, today's common mandolin design has eight metal strings broke up into four pairs or courses, and these strings are intended to be plucked using a plectrum. The latter design originated in Naples, a city in Italy, during the latter end of the eighteenth century. There were a great number of different variations to the traditional Mandolin, and this is still true today. Some of the Mandolin variations that are still known are the Milanese, the Brescian, the Lombard and numerous other Mandolin designs with either 6-course string sets or four string course sets where only one string per course was used. There were even twelve string course set instruments and sixteen string course sets where three or four strings were used per course respectively.

The mandolin has a body which is typically hollow and crafted from wood. The mandolin's neck is usually much longer with a fat fretted finger board, or one at a slight radius, along with a nut and floating bridge and a pinblock or a tailpiece at the edge of the face that the strings can be attached to. There are also mechanical tuning machines that are used to accommodate these metal strings in place of the traditional friction pegs. Just like with the guitar, the mandolin can only support a relatively poor level of sustain. What this means is that the sound generated by plucking a string will decay rather quickly. Notes cannot usually be maintained for arbitrary lengths of time like you would be able to achieve when playing a bowed note on an instrument like the violin.

Because the Mandolin is a smaller instrument with a higher pitch, the sustain issues are much more severe than in other similar instruments like the guitar. For this reason, use of tremolo, which means to rapidly pick one or more pairs of strings on the instrument, is often the best way to create a sustained chord or note. This particular technique works well because of the Mandolin's paired strings, because one string can be sounding while the other is in the process of being struck using the pick, which gives out a sound that is more round and more continuous than what you would achieve with an instrument consisting of single courses.

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Originally posted 2008-11-03 05:02:24. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Acoustic Musical Instruments, Instrument History, Mandolin

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eighteenth century, finger board, floating bridge, gut strings, lombard, lute family, Mandolin, mandolins, mandore, metal strings, milanese, musical instrument, plectrum, soprano, sound hole, sound holes, soundboard, string course, string sets, teardrop