Is there a crisis in mandolin, banjo and ukelele tone?

[Charlie Bernstein]

I would be interested in a market analysis, but one store-owner's experience is not a market analysis. . . .

Yup, I was using the words loosely. I just meant that a trend description isn't a crisis. More people using wood stoves isn't a reason to yank the fire alarm.

[OldSausage]

If you play guitar, everything else seems like a weird guitar. If you play piano, everything else seems like a weird piano.

God knows what happens if you play the spoons.

[Tom Haywood]

I think there is a legitimate question whether guitar players are a major driving force in the market for the design of other string instruments and whether there is a related subconscious preference for sound. The "guitjo" comes to mind as a good example. A banjo with six strings that tunes and plays like a guitar. Very popular instrument. Apparently there are lots of guitarists who want a banjo sound without learning to play the banjo. To my ear, those things sound more like a guitar even though the voicing is a banjo. In the mandolin world, there has been a trend toward wider neck width at the nut, wider string spacing overall, and a bit larger neck profile. I suggest that this is being driven by guitar players who are not comfortable with the traditional mandolin feel. Tests in my shop show that the amount of wood on the neck definitely affects the instrument tone. So, you get a different tone with these larger necks, probably due to different overtone frequencies predominating. Does this tone sound like a guitar? Not really, IMO. Does it sound more like a guitar than the "traditional" mandolin design? Possibly. The wider string spacing affects what your hands do. Does this result in more of a guitar sound? Maybe. Is all of this a "bad" thing? I think it expands the possibilities for evolution of the old designs.

[dan in va]

Hi Bernie. The OM's i've heard sound too much like a saloon piano to my ears. Maybe they're just not big enough to give up the deep resonance to sound like the larger mandolin i would want. And they just don't seem to have the same relationship that the cello has to the violin, and that's what i want in an OM.

The O18T is still a 4 string and sounds like a guitar, which just sounds better to me than the mandolin family OM. Here's the work that was done: saddle reset, neck set, new fret board. The first printing of Longworth's Martin Guitar book listed a couple of D sized tenor guitars -- this idea might sound really good as an OM...sorry there were no pics. i wonder what a quality re-engineered D sized 12 string guitar would sound like as an 8 string OM.