jerryk
Apr-08-2014, 10:59am
Hello,
My name is Jerry Kaidor, and I just found my father's mandolin..... therein hangs a tale.
I'm 60 years old, and have two six-month babies. That's a long story, I won't bore you with it.
Suffice to say that they need to be brought up, and I want music to be part of that. I sing to them a lot.
Can't sing worth a damn, but the babies don't care, and that has been liberating.
I thought to myself - it would be nice to strum some chords on something while I sing. My first thought was an autoharp. I remember the teachers playing them in early grades. It looked easy. Press the button, strum the chord. A modern autoharp gives you 21 different chords. It looked like a playable one would cost $200 - $300 on ebay.
Then I remembered my father's mandolin, sitting in my closet since he died in 1983. Probably harder to learn than an autoharp, but it had one great advantage - I already had it. So up I went to the highest shelf of the deepest closet - yup, there it was.
I pulled the instrument out of its bag, and one of the strings dangled free. Broken at the loop. Luckily, there was just enough string left to form a new loop and get it playing. I found one of the excellent on-line tuner programs and tuned it up.
"Gee the strings on this thing are awful close together. How can I get my right finger between them to strum?" I shook the instrument bag, and a small teardrop shaped piece of white plastic fell out. It said "Fender Medium" on the side. "Oh".
The web yielded up instructions and demonstrations of simple 2-finger chords. Very cool. There were also three-finger chords, but those seem to require that I bend my left hand into a pretzel. Maybe later.
I decided that the repaired string might not last, and a new set would be wise. My handy dial caliper gave me the diameters - ranging from .009" to .027". Hmm, the string sets on the web all seemed to be heavier gauge. I suspected that I might do the
instrument harm if I put in strings heavier than its design. One store had "ghs Ultra Light" strings, which were pretty close ( .009 -.032 ), so I bought two sets of those.
I also indulged in a "Snark SN8" tuner. What an amazing piece of technology! There must be a DSP (Digital Signal Processor ) in it. I wonder if it could help tune my piano?
The mandolin itself is nothing special. It is the "A" style with F holes. Clearly a cheap instrument. The top is three-layer plywood. The various fitments are the cheapest sort of plastic, some of them cracked. There is an extra fret next to the nut, which terminates the vibrating portion of the strings and sets their height. The nut itself is broken between the two E strings, but there is just - barely - enough meat left to keep them apart. I'm thinking it's not worth a whole lot of work - just new strings,
and adjust the bridge. But it sounds reasonably OK to my tin ear, and I can play it till I figure out whether I want to pursue this seriously.
The strings arrived the other day, and I restrung the mandolin. Strings are dangerous. Ouch! I'm glad my tetanus shot is up to date.
I am not a musician in any sense of the word, but I do have a little background. As a child, I endured 5 years of classical piano lessons. I played the cello in HS, played the soprano recorder with friends in college. I also discovered ragtime in college,
and banged out a lot of that on the piano.
I don't have any great ambition for this endeavour - just want to strum chords while I sing to my babies. That could change - I do tend to get sucked into things. But my hands are not the best - I messed them up in the 80's and the 90's doing software development - tendinitis :(.
Today, it looks like I need to scare up a replacement nut. It broke completely off
at the E string. Web research leads me to believe that it's no big deal - with the "zero fret", the nut just sets the positions of the strings from side to side. The strings vibrating quality is set by the zero fret. A quick search through the junkbox unearthed a bar of teflon scrap which might be ideal. If I can actually cut the slots. Teflon is easy to machine, but it is hard to abrade. I have a Sherline lathe & mill......
I don't think I'll be able to buy a nut off the shelf for this thing. A Tusq PQ-1535-00 is just about the right width. But the individual slots will be too wide. I suppose I could file out the bottoms of the slots to capture my instrument's small strings.
It's important to me to get this thing playing as fast as possible, before I lose traction and it just goes back into the closet.
My name is Jerry Kaidor, and I just found my father's mandolin..... therein hangs a tale.
I'm 60 years old, and have two six-month babies. That's a long story, I won't bore you with it.
Suffice to say that they need to be brought up, and I want music to be part of that. I sing to them a lot.
Can't sing worth a damn, but the babies don't care, and that has been liberating.
I thought to myself - it would be nice to strum some chords on something while I sing. My first thought was an autoharp. I remember the teachers playing them in early grades. It looked easy. Press the button, strum the chord. A modern autoharp gives you 21 different chords. It looked like a playable one would cost $200 - $300 on ebay.
Then I remembered my father's mandolin, sitting in my closet since he died in 1983. Probably harder to learn than an autoharp, but it had one great advantage - I already had it. So up I went to the highest shelf of the deepest closet - yup, there it was.
I pulled the instrument out of its bag, and one of the strings dangled free. Broken at the loop. Luckily, there was just enough string left to form a new loop and get it playing. I found one of the excellent on-line tuner programs and tuned it up.
"Gee the strings on this thing are awful close together. How can I get my right finger between them to strum?" I shook the instrument bag, and a small teardrop shaped piece of white plastic fell out. It said "Fender Medium" on the side. "Oh".
The web yielded up instructions and demonstrations of simple 2-finger chords. Very cool. There were also three-finger chords, but those seem to require that I bend my left hand into a pretzel. Maybe later.
I decided that the repaired string might not last, and a new set would be wise. My handy dial caliper gave me the diameters - ranging from .009" to .027". Hmm, the string sets on the web all seemed to be heavier gauge. I suspected that I might do the
instrument harm if I put in strings heavier than its design. One store had "ghs Ultra Light" strings, which were pretty close ( .009 -.032 ), so I bought two sets of those.
I also indulged in a "Snark SN8" tuner. What an amazing piece of technology! There must be a DSP (Digital Signal Processor ) in it. I wonder if it could help tune my piano?
The mandolin itself is nothing special. It is the "A" style with F holes. Clearly a cheap instrument. The top is three-layer plywood. The various fitments are the cheapest sort of plastic, some of them cracked. There is an extra fret next to the nut, which terminates the vibrating portion of the strings and sets their height. The nut itself is broken between the two E strings, but there is just - barely - enough meat left to keep them apart. I'm thinking it's not worth a whole lot of work - just new strings,
and adjust the bridge. But it sounds reasonably OK to my tin ear, and I can play it till I figure out whether I want to pursue this seriously.
The strings arrived the other day, and I restrung the mandolin. Strings are dangerous. Ouch! I'm glad my tetanus shot is up to date.
I am not a musician in any sense of the word, but I do have a little background. As a child, I endured 5 years of classical piano lessons. I played the cello in HS, played the soprano recorder with friends in college. I also discovered ragtime in college,
and banged out a lot of that on the piano.
I don't have any great ambition for this endeavour - just want to strum chords while I sing to my babies. That could change - I do tend to get sucked into things. But my hands are not the best - I messed them up in the 80's and the 90's doing software development - tendinitis :(.
Today, it looks like I need to scare up a replacement nut. It broke completely off
at the E string. Web research leads me to believe that it's no big deal - with the "zero fret", the nut just sets the positions of the strings from side to side. The strings vibrating quality is set by the zero fret. A quick search through the junkbox unearthed a bar of teflon scrap which might be ideal. If I can actually cut the slots. Teflon is easy to machine, but it is hard to abrade. I have a Sherline lathe & mill......
I don't think I'll be able to buy a nut off the shelf for this thing. A Tusq PQ-1535-00 is just about the right width. But the individual slots will be too wide. I suppose I could file out the bottoms of the slots to capture my instrument's small strings.
It's important to me to get this thing playing as fast as possible, before I lose traction and it just goes back into the closet.