Heavier gauge strings.

[jazzjune18]

Howdy, I recently completed a an octave mandolin. After I got it all strung up and played it for a little bit I noticed that the action was significantly high, so of course I lowered the action a lot. While lowering did make it much easier to play, I did notice that the instrument seem to have lost a lot of its volume and total character. I am assuming that it is because I now have less pressure pushing on the bridge. If I were to put slightly heavier gauge strings on it do you think that that would potentially help the volume and bring back a little bit of the fullness of tone that I experienced with the higher action? I guess my second part of the question is this: I am only able to find one set of octave mandolin strings, mediums. Has anyone seen any heavy gauge strings sets out there? I am currently using the set from d'adario. I could always buy individual strings from the local store however there are some times more costly find them individually, and I don't know how much thicker gauge each string should be compared to the d'addario octave mandolin set. Any help or comments would be greatly appreciated.

[Ivan Kelsall]

Lowering the action will reduce the volume of an instrument.A 'too low' action is something that crops up many times on here. Folk buy a good mandolin,decide that they want a low action,& end up finding that it's so low,that (usually) the A & E strings don't ring out as they should. Very often,just a tiny height adjustment to raise the action does the trick. It's a case of too high & the action is a bit hard on the fingers,but too low & the tone/volume of the instrument suffers. I adjusted the action on my 3 mandolins so that it was obviously too low,then raised the bridge height until i got the tone/volume i wanted & left it at that. My action is a tad higher than maybe most mandolins,but i have no problems.
To address your point regarding 'heavier' strings. My Lebeda mandolin,is slightly larger all round that what we might call a 'standard' mandolin. It weighs 3/4 Lb more than either my Weber or Ellis. When i began using DR brand strings,i put their MD11 set on my Weber & Lebeda (forget the Ellis - it wasn't around back then !). The Weber sounded fine,but the Lebeda was still a bit under-powered,so,i put a set of the heavier MD12's on it. It seemed to do the trick - more volume. However,i did notice that i had to pick the heavier strings harder to get 'em on the move - sounds ok so far ?. Then i had a thought (a dangerous thing at my age) - if i had to pick harder on the heavier strings,why not just pick as hard on the lighter strings ?. I put MD11 mediums on the Lebeda,picked just as hard as i had to on the MD12's & got more volume. Picking harder,i was moving the lighter strings more than i'd done before & the volume went up considerably = common sense. I should have realised anyway,that a larger,heavier mandolin would require more 'picking power' to get it moving. So that's the way i do it. I must also add,that after i began to use the Dunlop 'Primetone' picks instead of the Wegen Bluegrass picks i'd been using,that they contributed hugely to the apparent volume of my mandolins ( the Ellis is now in the picture as well).
The bottom line for me,is that going to a heavier string worked - to an extent,but going back to a lighter gauge string & simply picking a bit harder,worked far better. Also the use of a much 'better' pick, added considerably to the volume of my instruments,
Ivan

[pops1]

My mandolin has extremely low action and doesn't seem to suffer from being too quiet. If you lower the bridge and string height you also need to re-intonate. Properly intonated it will sound louder and ring. I am guessing when you raise the strings till it rings again you are simply getting back to proper intonation.

[Michael Lewis]

What is the string break angle over the bridge? And what is the scale length?