Members Stackabones Posted July 22, 2007 Members Share Posted July 22, 2007 Can I have one? Please, please, please?! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members kwakatak Posted July 22, 2007 Members Share Posted July 22, 2007 A large mandolin tuned like a cello? Pretty cool stuff! I think Freeman should build one! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Pascal Posted July 22, 2007 Members Share Posted July 22, 2007 And how about oud GAS? I bought one of these yesterday: (well, not the same, but pretty close) I'm so weak. :cry: Coolest thing ever, though. Sorry for hijacking your thread, Stack.... I just.... had to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Stackabones Posted July 22, 2007 Author Members Share Posted July 22, 2007 All is forgiven. POST A CLIP!!!! :love: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Pascal Posted July 22, 2007 Members Share Posted July 22, 2007 OK, I just shot this in my hotel room: It's crazy to see how frequent travels to the Middle East can change a European. I've only been here for a week, and I'm already all tanned and bearded! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Stackabones Posted July 22, 2007 Author Members Share Posted July 22, 2007 OK, I just shot this in my hotel room: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9tGPTYqfCs It's crazy to see how frequent travels to the Middle East can change a European. I've only been here for a week, and I'm already all tanned and bearded! Hey! I think I've been in that hotel! They never have any shaving supplies in the rooms. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Pascal Posted July 22, 2007 Members Share Posted July 22, 2007 More seriously, the oud I bought is VERY similar to the one on the pic I posted (could be the same builder), is a Turkish oud (shorter scale than Arabic oud) and is a cheap, student quality instrument. There are all sorts of ouds and ways to tune them. For some reason, mine has a nut for 5 double courses of strings, but a headstock and bridge for 5 double courses + 1 single bass string. I guess I'll work on the nut when I'm back home and will add a couple of strings. So far mine is tuned (low to high) to GADGC which is something similiar to the tuning this guy uses, I think... except I don't have his lowest bass string ©. Yet. It is quite surprising how quickly a guitar player can feel relatively at home on a oud. I guess it helps a lot that the scales are quite similar... After 1 full day, I'm still not quite as good as Simon Shaheen, though... Great precision, awesome right hand. Oh, and he also knows his maqamat. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Greymuzzle Posted July 22, 2007 Members Share Posted July 22, 2007 and it is alleged that it was to enable to play along with the oud that Davey Graham, who was in the area on 'erbal 'oliday, came up with the DADGAD tuning for guitar Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Phlat Phive Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 :love: I badly want a mandocello. Great video, that thing sounds fantastic. Congrats on the purchase Pascal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Pascal Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 I couldn't see the video, BTW... What soft do you watch it with? The oud is cool, thanks. Now the problem will be to fly it back to the UK with me: I've asked what would happen at the airport to both KLM and airport security crew ... and it looks like it'll be a surprise. Insh'Allah. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Phlat Phive Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 I couldn't see the video, BTW... What soft do you watch it with? The oud is cool, thanks. Now the problem will be to fly it back to the UK with me: I've asked what would happen at the airport to both KLM and airport security crew ... and it looks like it'll be a surprise. Insh'Allah. I'm using quicktime, no problem with the vid. Lose the beard and the the turban , 'cause with those and the ud they might think you're a terrorist. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Pascal Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 If I can fly with the oud, once in Schipol I'll see if I'm allowed to go out of the airport between my connecting flights (I have like 3 hours to kill in the early morning) . Just in case... I mean, the next time I'm flying.... if somebody wanted a oud too... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Phlat Phive Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 If I can fly with the oud, once in Schipol I'll see if I'm allowed to go out of the airport between my connecting flights (I have like 3 hours to kill in the early morning) . Just in case... I mean, the next time I'm flying.... if somebody wanted a oud too... Well, I'd still be interested. Problem is that when I graduate in a couple of months, I'll basically be unemployed, so money is a pretty serious concern for me right now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members garthman Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 You shouldn't have a problem with traking it on board the plane - it will be small enough to fit in an overhead locker so take it on as hand luggage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Pascal Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 You shouldn't have a problem with traking it on board the plane - it will be small enough to fit in an overhead locker so take it on as hand luggage. The problem is that, with the new security rules in the EU (which now also apply in the UAE, I think), it's in theory one hand luggage only, whatever it is. And I already have my laptop, since I'm here in the UAE for work. But you're right the fact that it's small enough to fit in the overhead lockers will hopefully make things easier... Well, we'll see... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Phlat Phive Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 Nope. Won't open with Quicktime either. It's a really good video. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Pascal Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Stackabones Posted July 23, 2007 Author Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 It's a really good video. Especially that one part ... wow! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Pascal Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 I felt so miserable, not being able to see the video, that I went back to the same shop and bought a Tar. Yes I did. This one's actually a special order for an Italian friend from France who is currently in Mali. Fits in my suitcase. It's a trade: I get her a Tar, and she gets me, her French friend from the UK who is currently in the UAE some Malian instrument. Maybe a Ngouni.... or a Kora.... Or a bow with a single string, attached to a tin can!!! :love: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Terry Allan Hall Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 I think Freeman should build one! Excellent idea...oh, Freeman... Found this, btw: About the mandocello: it's easy to decribe it as "a giant mandolin", and that's pretty accurate but doesn't really convey much about the ways in which the mandocello is its own unique voice. But let's start with the mandolin: physically it's a plucked violin (same tuning and size), but with doubled steel strings, usually played with a plectrum. violin, viola, cello, bass mandolin, mandola, mandocello, mandobass ...they come in families Mandolins appear in European music in the late 18th century, as successors to other plucked-string instruments like citterns and lauds and bandurrias ...which are all ultimately traceable back to the oud, a pan-Islamic lute and the ancestor of the European lute family. Traditionally, mandolins were bowl-backed and flat-topped (and the classical mandolin family still is), but in the 1890s Orville Gibson started experimenting with flat-backed and carved-back instruments with double strings. He also carved the tops, at least in part to provide support for higher tension strings and in search of greater volume. Gibson and other manufacturers built the whole family of mandolins, and by 1900 or so there were mandolin orchestras all over North America, playing from sheet music... An industry that bloomed along with the very earliest recorded music. So the mandocello was built and sold to take a particular voice --call it baritone-- in a plectral choir. I know of no famous early mandocellists, though there were certainly famous virtuoso mandolinists. The mandocello is a real handful. The scale length is about that of the guitar, but it's really not much of a chordal instrument --too much stretch for a lot of chords, since it's tuned in 5ths. The guitar is in 4ths and a 3rd in its standard tuning --not so far to reach to make chords with full voices of 5-6 notes). Mandocello was really a curiosity once the craze for mandolin orchestras faded. Very few were made by Gibson and Lyon & Healy and Martin after the mid-1920s, and they only resurfaced in the 1970s and 1980s, with (especially) the Celtic revival --but they are rare enough that there was plenty of niche space for innovation, and builders have explored bouzouki and cittern and other long-necked inventions and adaptations. The 60s and 70s in North America produced a whole new generation of musicians, many of them steeped in traditions they recovered from old recordings ...and many of them good enough to become professional musicians. One of the things professional musicians do is COLLECT INSTRUMENTS... so there got to be an active market for vintage instruments of various sorts, and for repair technicians and for luthiers who made copies of vintage instruments and experimented with new ideas in sound and design. So if you're a virtuoso mandolinist, a David Grisman or Sam Bush or Mike Marshall or Chris Thiele, you own a LOT of mandolins, and you get interested in the whole family. So there got to be a market for even mandocellos, and they're pretty scarce. So prices rose. 25 years ago you could buy a really fine Gibson mandocello for around $1000. Now that same one would be $6000-$8000 or more, depending on its details ...and a custom mandocello from the "best" maker was $16,000 ten years ago, and is now over $20,000. This is crazy, but it's true. Entry-level mandocellos are now over $1000, but there are a bunch of builders and some superb instruments being made. Most of the custom builders are mandolin and guitar makers who make the occasional mandocello. The instrument is a curiosity, and has no clearly defined function in any musical tradition. It's up for grabs, in that sense, and innovators are doing lots of creative things. The Gibson approach to the mandocello was to enlarge the mandolin, but stay with its conventions of shape and basic construction: carved back and top. Another approach has been to put an 8-string neck on a guitar body, and one occasionally finds those --Santa Cruz Guitar Company now has such a model (at about $4000), Gibson made one (the K5) in very small numbers in the 1920s, Ovation makes one with space-age materials and electronics, and my Dell'Arte is based on a French jazz guitar design. The engineering challenge is in the tension that 8 fat strings require, and most guitar-body mandocellos have tailpieces and floating bridges, so the string tension presses DOWN on the top, instead of pulling UP as a conventional guitar pin bridge does. This means that the top needs to be shaped (a carved top is the conventional answer, its curve conveying the tension of the strings to the SIDES of the soundbox) or else it needs pretty heavy bracing, to keep the top from being pushed down by the string tension. Either "solution" changes the sound quite significantly --a mandocello really doesn't sound much like a guitar. There are other details of body shape and materials and bracing that are interesting to luthiers. My Dell'Arte mandocello makes a nice example of a different approach to construction than that taken by Orville Gibson: it's built with a version of the Selmer guitar associated with "Gypsy jazz" and especially with Django Reinhardt. The whole construction is much lighter than the Gibson, and it has a flat top and back --and uses strings of the same type as the Gypsy guitar, wound on a copper core. I can't get the largest gauge of strings for the Dell'Arte, so I'm using strings from guitar sets, and tuning the instrument higher. The canonical tuning of the mandocello is CGDA --the low C is an .074 for the Gibson, a really fat string. I've tuned the Dell'Arte Eb Bb F C (a minor 3rd above the standard mandocello tuning). I can capo at the 4th fret to make it GDAE, the octave mandolin tuning. But since I mostly play it as a solo instrument, I'm happy with the Eb Bb F C tuning. My approach to playing mandocello is basically scalar, across and along the whole neck, with a lot of sliding to notes, and 2- and 3-string chords. This is developed out of experiments, not from any approved method, so it's not "how to play mandocello", and it's not really scaled-up mandolin playing either. It's the outcome of 20+ years of explorations, and I'm always discovering new possibilities that I could have known about earlier... Case in point is the IV chord in a standard blues progression in G on standard tuning or Bb on the Dell'Arte mandocello. There's a wonderful voicing that just works perfectly --it's "there" on the mandolin, but not easily reached (short neck, close frets), and the highest and lowest strings can either be left open OR they can be fretted to make a very jazzy chord. But I only discovered that chord about 3 years ago, and I'm still working out what to do with it. http://oook.info/musics/wlur.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Phlat Phive Posted July 23, 2007 Members Share Posted July 23, 2007 I felt so miserable, not being able to see the video, that I went back to the same shop and bought a Tar. Yes I did. This one's actually a special order for an Italian friend from France who is currently in Mali. Fits in my suitcase. It's a trade: I get her a Tar, and she gets me, her French friend from the UK who is currently in the UAE some Malian instrument. Maybe a Ngouni.... or a Kora.... Or a bow with a single string, attached to a tin can!!! :love: The tar is a beautiful instrument. A friend of mine (he's from Iran) plays one, and quite well I might add. It has such a subtle, delicate, and beautiful sound. Get one for yourself as well. I'm not really that familiar with the kora, other than having heard it on some records (mostly Habib Koit Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Stackabones Posted July 24, 2007 Author Members Share Posted July 24, 2007 Hey, TAH! That Ovation Mandocello is the first one I ever played at a music store. It still resonates with me. I really liked it then, and I really want one now! Congrats on the tar, Pascal! I've been around Iranians for most of my life. Incredible music! It's been a while since I've listened to that music. I'll have to see if I have anything still around. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Pascal Posted July 24, 2007 Members Share Posted July 24, 2007 Really interesting article, TAH, thanks. I'm now quite curious about it and would love to try one... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Terry Allan Hall Posted July 24, 2007 Members Share Posted July 24, 2007 Hey, TAH! That Ovation Mandocello is the first one I ever played at a music store. It still resonates with me. I really liked it then, and I really want one now! Haven't had a chance to play one yet, but I hope to one of these days...If I bought one, I'd probably tune it GDAE, and leave the K4 in CGDA... Just wish I could find another affordable K4...it looks so cool and sounds so great, but I'm sure that was a once-in-a-lifetime deal! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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