String gauge question

[Pete Martin]

I have 16" scale mandola. I'm playing mostly straight ahead Jazz these days, Real Book standards and bebop tunes. In some ensembles, I want a lower voice than mandolin tuning, but normal mandola tuning is too close to guitar range.

I'm wanting to tune this mandola Eb Bb F C (low to high) and see if it gives the voice I'm looking for. Any idea on the gauges of strings to make this tuning work? Thanks in advance!

[mandolooter]

Hi Pete, I don't have the answer but do a search for the string guage calculater...the one at a fellow named Mc dowell's I belive, is the one I used for my tenor guitar...the link is on my other computer at work tho. I hope this helps some.

[Jim Broyles]

Here's a String Tension Calculator. (http://www.mcdonaldstrings.com/stringxxiii.html)
You can enter scale length and the note you want to tune to and it will give you the total tension. When I used 12, 17, 28, 46 tuned like you want to try, it said it was a total tension of 189.32 pounds. 10,16,24, 42 is 151.3 pounds. Normal mandola tuning using 13, 20, 32 and 50 gives you 167.56 pounds. Looks doable with fairly light strings. A mando set like the J75's might work real well. A set of J74's is 153 pounds.

[Dr.Tweak]

I worked this out for a mandolin with a 13 7/8" scale length last year, using Arto's String Calculator (http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/wikla/mus/Calcs/wwwscalc.html):

C # #0.352mm (.014 in.) plain steel

F # #0.481mm (.019 in.) or 0.504mm (.020 in.) plain steel or phosphor-bronze wound

Bb #0.832mm (.032 -> .033 in.) phosphor-bronze wound

Eb #1.291mm (.049 -> .051 in.) phosphor-bronze wound

I strung up a mandolin with these strings and was very pleased with the result.