29er
Mar-02-2009, 6:32pm
I spent a couple of hours today at Different Strummer in Chicago trying out a few of what I thought might be a future upgrade from my first mandolin, a pretty nice Mid-Missouri MO-W. I've been learning the mandolin for only a few months after a long time playing fingerstyle blues guitar.
Long story short, my Mid-Mo sounds better (to my ears) than the three Eastman's I tried. The Eastman's were all beautiful with nice woods & finish work but they were all kind of quiet & thin sounding compared to my Mid-Mo. I'm sure they'd open up after a while but I was kind of surprised that I didn't really care that much for their tone. They were 500 & 600 series instruments & one of them was an oval hole 515 (I think)
I then went upscale & tried a Weber Bitterroot & Gallatin. Both of these sounded great, although I'm not sure I can pull the trigger on spending that much cash......yet ;)
The most important thing I learned was that I need to stick with a wider nut width. My Mid-Mo is a wide nut version & all of these mando's I played had the "normal" nut width & I had problems with them all for that reason.
I've been through all this before in my guitar horse trading days & I realize that each instrument is an individual that needs to be put through it's paces and that one shouldn't necessarily go by price/brand alone when shopping.
Still, as a noobie to the world of mandolin's this was a lot of fun and next to perusing this site, the best time I've spent in my quest to learn my new instrument.
Oh, and Different Strummer is a cool little shop:mandosmiley:
Long story short, my Mid-Mo sounds better (to my ears) than the three Eastman's I tried. The Eastman's were all beautiful with nice woods & finish work but they were all kind of quiet & thin sounding compared to my Mid-Mo. I'm sure they'd open up after a while but I was kind of surprised that I didn't really care that much for their tone. They were 500 & 600 series instruments & one of them was an oval hole 515 (I think)
I then went upscale & tried a Weber Bitterroot & Gallatin. Both of these sounded great, although I'm not sure I can pull the trigger on spending that much cash......yet ;)
The most important thing I learned was that I need to stick with a wider nut width. My Mid-Mo is a wide nut version & all of these mando's I played had the "normal" nut width & I had problems with them all for that reason.
I've been through all this before in my guitar horse trading days & I realize that each instrument is an individual that needs to be put through it's paces and that one shouldn't necessarily go by price/brand alone when shopping.
Still, as a noobie to the world of mandolin's this was a lot of fun and next to perusing this site, the best time I've spent in my quest to learn my new instrument.
Oh, and Different Strummer is a cool little shop:mandosmiley: