![]() Unless you’re living in the south of Italy, of course. So, if you’re hoping to avoid the mainstream – if you really want to be cool – the mandolin is maybe the instrument for you. We all know plenty of guitarists in fact, the guitar these days is maybe a little too common. If you’re thinking about learning to play this stringed instrument, you may well be onto a winner. Your best bet, really, is to head to the south of Italy, where they were born – and where they still inform much of the traditional music. Maybe you’ll come across one every so often in a folk club, if you’re lucky, whilst the odd specialist guitar shop will probably stock a couple. Sometimes the octave mandolin (also referred to as an octave mandola) is included as well.The mandolin is not one of those instruments that you see around very much. Mandolas are sometimes played in mandolin orchestras, along with other members of the mandolin family: mandolin, mandocello and mandobass. Alex Lifeson, guitarist of Rush, has also featured the mandola in his work. Attila the Stockbroker, punk poet and frontman of Barnstormer, uses an electric mandola as his main instrument. Like the guitar, the mandola can be acoustic or electric. ![]() Some Irish traditional musicians, following the example of Andy Irvine, restring the tenor mandola with lighter, mandolin strings and tune it F-C-G-C (two semi-tones lower than G-D-A-D, since the mandola's fretboard is two frets longer than the mandolin's), while others (Brian McDonagh of Dervish being the best known) use alternate tunings such as D-A-E-A. It is sometimes played in Irish traditional music, but the instruments octave mandolin, Irish bouzouki and modern cittern are more commonly used. The mandola is commonly used in folk music-particularly Italian folk music. The double strings accommodate a sustaining technique called tremolando, a rapid alternation of the plectrum on a single course of strings. ![]() The mandola is typically played with a plectrum (pick). The scale length is typically around 42 cm (16.5 inches). The mandola has four double courses of metal strings, tuned in unison. However, significantly different instruments have at times and places taken on the same or similar names, and the "true" mandola has been strung in several different ways. Historically related instruments include the mandore, mandole, vandola (Joan Carles Amat, 1596), bandola, bandora, bandurina, pandurina and – in 16th-century Germany – the quinterne or chiterna. The instrument developed from the lute at an early date, being more compact and cheaper to build, but the sequence of development and nomenclature in different regions is now hard to discover. The name mandola may originate with the ancient pandura, and is also rendered as mandora, the change perhaps having been due to approximation to the Italian word for "almond". (The word mandolin means little mandola.) The mandola, though now rarer, is an ancestor of the mandolin. It is to the mandolin what the viola is to the violin: the four double courses of strings tuned in fifths to the same pitches as the viola ( C 3-G 3-D 4-A 4), a fifth lower than a mandolin. ![]() The mandola (US and Canada) or tenor mandola (Ireland and UK) is a fretted, stringed musical instrument. ![]()
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