How do you answer "what is that thing?", when playing a mandolin!

[T.D.Nydn]

I've always answered that it's a mandolin,,,I showed someone my F model once,they just stared at it,having never seen one before,this person was 36 years old and an accomplished guitarist,,I can't believe how many people have no clue as to what this beautiful instrument is..

[catmandu2]

Well c'mon, it does look like some kind of souped-up, florentine, les paul-ulele kind a thing..

[bratsche]

Yeah, I remember Sanforized, and Martinizing, not to mention Speedy Alka-Seltzer and the Cheerios Kid. I'm so old, that when I was born, the Dead Sea was just sick.

And I have this drawer full of S&H Green Stamps. I was hoping to maybe trade them in for an octave mandolin one day, but the store seems to have closed, and few people remember it was even there....

bratsche

[Billy Packard]

This has happened to me at gigs so many times...

The person comes up wondering what I'm playing and when I say "It's a Mandolin!" and the reply is so often, "Oh! I LOVE the mandolin!"

In other words they're not sure what it is but they already know they love the mandolin!

Perfect time to be a mandolinist, por que?



Billy

billypackardmandolin.com

[dhergert]

I tell them it's a carrot or potato slicer. (Mandoline)

[mandroid]

the Late David Hodson made Djangolin , its a Selmer guitar like , Uke Sized mandolin, so it's expected..

[Louise NM]

I walk past a One-Hour Martinizing every day on my way to work! They're alive and well in New Mexico (although the pronunciation tends towards "Martínez-ing"!)

Saw a woodblock print once called Angel With a Mandolin. Said "mandolin" was tucked under the angels chin, played with a bow, and left-handed to boot. Can't speak to whether the angel's wings were attached correctly.

[Bertram Henze]

I was in a violin shop buying a viola chin rest clamp for my armrest. I took my mandolin in and put the wood part on top of the mandolin so they would understand what I was doing. A young violin player asked me what it was. I told her and explained that if she practiced her violin so she could play well, she could get a mandolin and playing it would be easy for her because the fingering was the same. Her eyes lit up with possibilities. Not so sure about her mother though.

I can relate to that. I always liked the idea of playing an illicit violin

[Ivan Kelsall]

From dhergert -"I tell them it's a carrot or potato slicer. (Mandoline)" Mandoline - You'd be amazed (or maybe not !), at just how many folk selling them leave off the "E" at the end,
Ivan

[Tim N]

No one's seen me playing my mandolin yet - except for my family and the cat - but I think many people do have a concept of "mandolin" as opposed to "Irish Bouzouki", which certainly does draw questions (see my quotation below) because I tell them my bouzouki is an inflated mandolin, and they normally get it. If in doubt, some people revert to "banjo"because... well, they do.
The thing is, all these instruments are related, so even if people do refer to the "funny guitar thing", it's not totally wide of the mark. You could just stick your mandolin under your chin and say that it's almost a violin - which isn't so far from the truth!
So it's always an interesting question.

[Bertram Henze]

Last night at the jam I told this one person it was a trombone.

Maybe it was not completely wrong to say that, because:

...The thing is, all these instruments are related, so even if people do refer to the "funny guitar thing", it's not totally wide of the mark.

[Tim N]

Then, Bertram, you are far more generous in your thinking than I am - or your imagination knows no limits! Well, as Steve Knightley says: It's all folk music

[Bertram Henze]

Then, Bertram, you are far more generous in your thinking than I am - or your imagination knows no limits! Well, as Steve Knightley says: It's all folk music

Let's just, for a warm-up, prove that your mandolin is a kettle drum:
GDAE-strung, related to the Irish tenor banjo
The ITB has a drum built right into it and is thus a relative of the kettle drum.
That genetic ancestry comes forward when you use your mandolin for chopping...
Tomorrow we'll reveal the other branch of the family tree, reaching all the way to the trombone with perhaps a mellotron en route...

[Jim Garber]

although there was one occasion when I walked into a venue carrying my National RM-1 case and someone asked me "What kind of banjo is that?".

Well, you can certainly understand that even a banjo player would think there was a banjo in a case like that. At least my National looks like a banjo. Maybe yours is in a different case?

[Bren]

Working on an offshore rig once, a stewardess had heard that I had a guitar, so she came down to my cabin and asked for a look.
I pulled out my mandolin and she said, "Oh, it's just a little one".

I've had "Can you play Duelling Banjos on that ukulele?" to which I have a very good reply.

Usually, I just tell them it's a mandolin. By the time I've finished my discourse on the history of the instrument they're looking for the exit. If I'm so inclined, I play O Solo Mio or Godfather.

Twenty years ago, I was going through airport security in Damascus with a tenor banjo, after working for six weeks in the oil & gas fields around Deir Ez Zor (today the scene of fierce and devastating battles). I had been living in a staff house with a bunch of Egyptian field engineers and one had showed me the "Arabic scale" on the house piano (think "Miserlou" Pulp Fiction theme).

Anyway, security were quizzing me about what it was so I picked it up and played a tune in that scale.

"Ah" one said to the others, "Muzika". So there you are, it's official.

[foldedpath]

I was a stone-age flip phone user until recently. I finally upgraded to a "smart phone" over the summer. With a recent software upgrade, it now has a feature called "Google Lens," where the software will look at a photo I take on the phone, and try to identify what it is. I showed it a photo I took last week of a cast iron pan on the stove with some Italian sausages browning, and it thought it might be Bratwurst. No, but close.

So I placed my Lebeda F5 on a neutral background on the floor, and shot it straight-on. Google Lens said it was a "string instrument." It showed me some close matches that were all electric solidbody violins.

So almighty Google AI doesn't even know what my mandolin is!

But that it got that close is impressive. Give it a year, and it will probably tell me that it's a mandolin and it looks like it needs work on the frets.

[tonydxn]

I used to have my workshop in a craft centre. One day a couple came in; the man turned to his wife and said, 'This bloke's making barralaikas.'

[Charlie Bernstein]

I dunno. The only time anyone ever asked me, I said, "It's a mandolin."

Is this a trick question?

[MontanaMatt]

I dunno. The only time anyone ever asked me, I said, "It's a mandolin."

Is this a trick question?

I posted this when I was still a little peeved by an experience with a rude (not for their question) customer....in Montana most everyone knows the mando, it's been part of local music culture for a while. Flat Iron and Weber (thanks Bruce!) have been present all of my time here. So it catches me off guard when someone awkwardly asks. The person who started this, with their question at a show, was from Madison...a college town, that has a rich music history. Lots of major acts tour through. It's not far from Kalamazoo. Mandolin is in country music, rock music, on "Americans got some talent". It's not an obscure foreign folk instrument, like the mandola

[Paul Hird]

Same as Charlie. "It's a Mandolin"

[Steve Ostrander]

I always answer politely when people ask. If they ask, that means they are interested, and usually they say the love the sound. I have never had anyone be obnoxious about it. Except my band mates, who often tease me that it's a kiddie guitar, and when I master it, they'll get me a full-size model....

[Tobin]

I was a stone-age flip phone user until recently. I finally upgraded to a "smart phone" over the summer. With a recent software upgrade, it now has a feature called "Google Lens," where the software will look at a photo I take on the phone, and try to identify what it is. I showed it a photo I took last week of a cast iron pan on the stove with some Italian sausages browning, and it thought it might be Bratwurst. No, but close.

So I placed my Lebeda F5 on a neutral background on the floor, and shot it straight-on. Google Lens said it was a "string instrument." It showed me some close matches that were all electric solidbody violins.

So almighty Google AI doesn't even know what my mandolin is!

But that it got that close is impressive. Give it a year, and it will probably tell me that it's a mandolin and it looks like it needs work on the frets.

I've never played with Google Lens, but I happened to be browsing through my photo gallery on my phone just the other day and noticed something slightly disturbing. When I click to see the details of a photo, I see all the usual info: time, date, location, etc. But it also categorizes my photos based on some sort of recognition algorithm. I did not put this info in there, but it knows to categorize pictures of my puppy as "dogs", and pictures of a homemade pizza I made as "food". I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this capability is there, but it caught me off guard that Google (or whatever company is responsible for this) is quietly categorizing the content of my personal photos. It means that when I take a photo on my phone, it is somehow sending that photo to a server where it can run a recognition program without my knowledge. There's no way that sort of recognition database could be local just to my phone.

Unsurprisingly, it did not know how to categorize photos of my fiddles or mandolins.

[Bertram Henze]

Modern deep neural networks act as classifiers that very much adher to the classes they were trained on. You can see how Google's Deep Dreaming (searching for dogs and birds in pictures) leaves my OM largely untouched, while rest of me gets thoroughly beastfied...

[bratsche]

leaves my OM largely untouched, while rest of me gets thoroughly beastfied...

Well, who is surprised by that, Bertram? Seriously, if your instrument had more obviously detailed and visible wood grain, it would be "beastified" as well.

bratsche

[Randi Gormley]

My-husband-the-guitar-player and I went to a Halloween party Saturday after spending a couple of hours at an Irish session so we went as "itinerant musicians" because we didn't want to leave our instruments in the car. When I walked in with my mandolin in its shaped case, one of the other guests asked "ukelele or banjo?" ... to which I replied with a smile, "mandolin!"