Hi, all. I played violin when I was younger, tried to get back into about 10 years ago when life got in the way, and then got back into it again this past fall when it felt like the pandemic was sucking the soul out of me (I work in healthcare). I tried to play guitar about 20 years ago, but with small hands and never really liking the way a guitar was tuned (why so many strings? Why fourths and then a random third??), I gave up. My friend recently got a mandolin and after some quick internet searching about how they were tuned the same, I picked up an Eastman 604 at Elderly, then somehow that led to getting a Blueridge 40t tenor guitar that I had restrung GDAE, but neither was really perfect for what I wanted to play, so I started casually browsing the ads here and Elderly's website. When a 2011 Weber F Bitterroot octave mandolin with an oval hole came up for sale, I pounced immediately and traded in the Eastman and Blueridge. I love it. It's different enough from my husband's guitars in sound, the tuning is familiar, I play it with cello fingering in first position and then with mandolin fingering in 3rd positions on up. I enjoy playing classical (working on the cello suites, inspired by Phil Woodhull's recent full recording on mandolin), melody chord versions of popular songs (singer-songwriter type music, classic Beatles and Simon/Garfunkel), starting to dip my toe into bluegrass/country music (azalea waltz, Wildwood flower), but I'm not interested really in Bluegrass jams.
My string question - I loved the TI's I put on the Eastman, then quickly found out that TI doesn't really have quite the same offering for octave mandolins. The octave mandolin strings look like they might be too short for my 20" scale instrument. I found emando's flatwound string offerings for octave mandolin, but the gauges suggested for my scale length, the "heavy", seem too high, and "medium" too low based on a search I did on this forum for Weber recommended string gauges for the octave mandolins. Any of you have experience with these strings and would recommend the heavy over the medium or vice versa? Thanks in advance
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