Hello everyone,
Don't post on here much, but just got an Eastwood Mandocaster in the mail a couple weeks ago and thought I'd report in.
Here's the mando and rig I'm using at the moment (often with headphones as courtesy to my apartment building):
Early impressions: contrary to what a lot of people online think, I don't think it sounds like a tiny guitar (maybe 4 string electrics do more so?) but it has the same lower midrange presence and high end sparkle as a mandolin (which my strat does not have). I mostly stick to the neck pickup-it rounds off the highs a little for single note lines, and the middle, two pickup position, produces a nice mid-scooped sound for strumming chords without getting in the way. The bridge pickup I only ever use for overdrive sound. It handles overdrive ok, but tubescreamer type ODs and other mid humped ODs seem to accentuate all the wrong frequencies. It sounds better with my relatively transparent TC Electronic MojoMojo than it does with my Boss SD-1. On the Zoom, I stick with a Two Rock amp model for OD that is less mid-rangey than the Marshall models.
That being said, I don't think overdriven sounds are where it shines. It has a very nice clean tone (that is vaguely reminiscent of a telecaster). Some reviews on the internet complained about it being unbalanced across the strings-the g-strings are louder than the e-strings. This is definitely accurate, but even a modest amount of compression evens out the frequency response beautifully and gives you a nice, full sound. The two presets I wind up going back to over and over again are a) slight compression, a clean boost for leads, and some subtle reverb, and b) slight compression, followed by delay and a more pronounced reverb for those ambient sounds. The clean sounds are really where it shines, but I don't think it will ever replace your acoustic mandolin in a bluegrass context, that's just no what its for!
tl;dr: with a little compression, produces a nice clean electric mandolin tone, not a substitute for your acoustic mandolin.
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