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This is helpful to hear about for me, I've always feared flying with nice instruments...

Which raises the related question: What is the nicest mandolin that you'd risk flying with?

For me, I'd...

It's worth mentioning though, that a lot of very nice imported carved top mandolns, and a lot of excellent domestic small-shop boutique carved top mandolins, are available at very reasonable prices. ...

Yes, but can your kids play it?

;)

My biggest concern for 15 years is the neck-to-body joint, if glued, no matter the design. It's basically the central tension point on a mandolin that requires the most work to rebuild.

The...

I'm using the D' Addario (formerly Planet Waves) Micro Tuners on all of my stringed instruments. They're discrete, effective and compact, they offer a number of handy features, and I've never had...

If you can live with the matte texture, you could try to carefully rub out the nickel plating with graduated concentrations of polishing compound, but if you go through the plaiting the bronze will...

If it were me, I'd lower the tension of the strings to just barely enough to hold the bridge in place. Then I'd store the mandolin in a case, and perhaps also in a case-bag, and store it somewhere...

Actually, we can still ask "anything". ;)

I'd add to what Louise has mentioned, keep in mind that the mandolin is a completely different animal than a violin. Really the only major thing the violin and the mandolin have in common is a GDAE...

It might be nice to know what year the A-9 in question is. Some years are more desirable than others. The build date can be extruded from the serial number.

Worth mentioning for the OP, the term...

I like the ergo-design of many of the boutique armrests, a number of them look very comfortable.

But when I look at them, to my view, they're visually pretty overwhelming for such a small...

This is just an individual owner's judgment call... There is some precedence to making the edges of a mandolin's speed neck look like a violin's speed neck, which typically has feathered, but smooth...

After live performances we often have people come up to us and say something like "I cannot do music at all, but I love listening to it". My wife will often respond with "music would be no where...

Educators, especially educators of young-age students can elaborate on this better than I, but there is a period in child development which is the ideal learning period for learning spoken languages....

I also play banjo, and until a few years ago all my banjos had nickel plated metal parts. Like many people, I'm mildly allergic to nickel when it is touching skin. I had to get used to wearing an...

Worth mentioning though, there's definately a place for "eye trained" people in music. I have a brother who plays violin with symphonies, and while there may be people present there who can...

... And, along those same lines, the Kern County Museum makes a very nice place to visit and walk around, we especially enjoy their outdoor Pioneer Village which has some quite extensive historical...

Some folks believe that the ToneGard improves an instrument's sound by preventing the instrument from being in contact and being muted against the player's body. If that's the case, the potential...

Absolutely. Already booked, two connected rooms, one for us, the other for jamming. Come on by, drop in!

Yup, we've examined this option carefully. A standard USB CD/DVD R/W drive for a computer typically costs less than $50US. The clincher for most cars is that the drive has to emulate a thumbdrive,...

I must confess I'm most well known as a 5-string banjo player and a double bass player...

I love my mandolins too, but I'm much more shy about playing them in public, they're more of a cathartic...

If your car doesn't have a CD player (like my new one doesn't) it's time to setup your USB thumbdrives. We have over 48 hours of music that we know we like on thumbdrives.

If your car doesn't...

I totally agree with this. 95% of the time when I'm improvising, whether it's going to be a break or a short backup riff, I have no idea exactly what I'm going to do a minute before. Within 10...

This is probably going to be a little controversial, but it is my experience...

I remember as a very young kid, before I played any instruments, hearing songs and repeating them by whistling or...

To me, the reason it's so great is that it was improvised, on the fly, at least at first. The artist didn't sit down and consider all the compositional elements to include before he played it. It...