Who knew that Electric Coil Mandolins even existed? We all know that Electric Coil Pickups are
what make electric guitars sound so great.
Yes there are Electric Mandolins, and they have been around for a long
time, but they use piezo electric pickups which, if you know about them, they just
pick up the vibration of the instrument and send it on to an amplifier circuit. The piezo pickups are generally placed either
on or close to the bridge or somewhere on the body of the instrument where the
sound is most pleasing. Electric Violins
also use piezo pickups. I have an NS
Design Viola that uses several piezo pickups and it has a good pre-amp with
good sound qualities. But a violin is a
bowed instrument and is an animal all to itself. I would not have wanted a piezo electric
mandolin just as I would not want an acoustic guitar with piezo pickups, as
they sound, well, so NOT rock and roll.
Then something happened that would change my life. Remember the Dixie Chicks? Well, I was at the local Musical Instrument
Store on the Island and they had a video going of one of some old Dixie Chick Concert,
and the ‘Chick’ that plays violin and mandolin, Martie Maquire, well, she was
playing what looked like an electric coil mandolin. Wow! I
had no idea that such a thing even existed.
And right then and there I was determined to get one. That was the middle of November last year.
I went home and started Web Searching for ‘Electric Coil
Mandolins’. There did not really seem
to be much ‘top of the line’ stuff out there.
Amazon was then selling their Eastwood Telecaster Style Mandolin, which
they would not ship to me, as I am not currently on American Mainland soil, but
I was able to find a Morgan Monroe Telecaster style at the Mandolin Store, and
they were glad to do International Shipping for me. I got the Morgan Monroe, but in order to
review it, I did the review at Amazon under the Eastwood item… you can still
read that review… it was very favorable.
Yes, the instruments are not the best quality, but when one factors in
the very low prices – from $250 to $350, then one has to consider what one is
getting for one’s money, and these cheap things play relatively well, and are a
lot of fun. One serious drawback, however, was the very noisy pickups, in
regards to power line hum, especially in any room with florescent lighting… you
really have to be careful about where you face the mandolin or the line hum can
get seriously loud, that is between songs… one would have to be really fussy to
pretend one can still hear line hum while in the middle of the song, but during
pauses in the music, it can become an issue.
Now, in the Electric Guitar world, one can get what they call Humbucker
pickups, that is pickups that are made of two coils, not just one, and each
coil is wired in mirror image to the other, so that the noise in one pickup is
exactly cancelled out by the noise in the other pickup, being 180 degrees phase
opposed to each other. Or like my Fender
base, which has two pickups – a neck pickup and a bridge pickup – that mirror
each other, and as long as you keep both pickups on and at the same volume, you
don’t get line hum noise. But my cheapy
Morgan Monroe had two pickups but each was wired in the same polarity, and so
both pickups gather up noise, and instead of cancelling each other out, they simply
add to each other.
Doing a Web Search I found that the only people that had
Mandolin Humbucker Pickups available were Almuse in the U.K. (http://www.almuse.co.uk/mandolins.html),
and Moongazer Music in Montana U.S.A., http://www.moongazermusic.com/info.html,
who sold Almuse Pickups under some kind of licensing agreement with Almuse in
England.
At first I was reluctant to look at Almuse in England
because their Website shows a great many mandolins, but they are all marked
“Sold”, and the website says that it takes about between 4 to 6 months for a
Custom Order to be completed. The prices
seemed very reasonable (a two pickup instrument going for £465, or about $750),
but I was worried about the add-ons, and I was still quite ignorant of what I
should ask for. Buying ‘off the rack’ is
easy, but to buy Custom is a challenge I was nervous about taking.
But when my cheapy arrived and realized how much fun it was
to play – so much Rock and Roll potential.
You know, I should mention right
now that you don’t have to play an Electric Mandolin like a regular Mandolin in
that regular mandolin kind of style, that is, with that constant trilling of
the strings with some bumble bee quick method of picking … think Rod Stewart’s
“Maggie Mae” at the end of the song where we here perhaps the best or at least
the most famous mandolin part in Rock and Roll History. Well, no, that is not what these Electric
Mandolins are really made for… not in my opinion anyway. What I like about an Electric Coil Mandolin
is that the String Pairs drone against each other, offering a full and
complicated sound (oh, in case you don’t know,
a mandolin has 8 strings, tuned to GG DD AA EE, and a Mandola is tuned
to CC GG DD AA… similar to how Violins and Violas are tuned). Also the string pairs have a good feel when
you are fingering the neck. After
playing a mandolin for a while, electric guitars feel strange with their six
separate strings, and the sound, while
having a more ‘clear as a bell’ quality, still, loses out in not being as rich
and full as the Mandolin with its droning string pairs.
Now, to get back to what I was saying, when I realized I was
not going to quit the Electric Mandolin, and that I wanted to pursue it
further, I decided the only way to go ‘Up Scale’ was to contact Almuse in the
U.K. I sent my first inquiry off on the
24 of November of last year. I just now
went back over my email history to remind me of it all. My worries about deciding on Custom details
were misplaced. It turns out that Almuse
Company in the U.K. is for the most part incarnated in the person of Mr. Pete
Mallinson, who quickly answered my email, and started a dialogue with me to
figure out exactly what I was looking for, and what any of my special needs might
be. Because I wanted Humbucker
Pickups, I wanted a mandolin that would look as though the humbucker style
belonged to it, and this of course suggested a Fender Jazzmaster style. I also told Mr. Mallinson that I had a
problem with my real Fender Jazzmaster, that my energetic picking style would
sometimes whip the strings clear off the bridge. So Mr. Mallinson suggested that he could
shorten the tail between the bridge and the string terminator bar that the
strings thread into, which would help to keep the strings in place. I then told Mr. Mallinson that because of an
old nerve injury to my right hand, I was using a kind of ‘Pick Stick’ – pieces
of trim wood glued together with picks in between, which I could grip with the
fingers that still had decent muscle control and feeling. But that I was often wild and crazy in the
application of these Pick Sticks and had once gone outside the pick guard of a
very good Fender Stratocaster and dug into the paint. So Pete (I started calling him Pete very
soon) suggested he could take his usual Jazzmaster Design and modify it to give
a bit more pick guard coverage, and that I should use covered Humbuckers, and
that he could reposition the switches further back from the ‘strike zone’ so I
would not be accidentally changing my setting with that wild pick stick action. Pete Mallinson was very thoughtful and
engaged in the Custom Decision Process.
It did take a while. Remember, my
first inquiry was on 24 November, and it was not until the 23rd of
December that I got very detailed drawing plans, and once I approved these, I
got pricing information on the 6th of January this year. $750 a piece (this is the base price… so he
did not charge me for any of the little changes we agreed upon), and this price
is quite reasonable, in fact, the cheapest I have ever heard of for any kind of
custom electric guitar like thing on the Market. Oh, during the deliberation and decision
phase, I decided to place ANOTHER order – for a matching Mandola. You see, as a former violin player that moved
up to Viola, I suspected that I might want to do the same thing here, or to at
least own a Mandola. And since there was
no place to just instantly buy a Mandola, the wisest course would be to place
the order at the same time as the Mandolin order. That has worked out to be one of the better
day to day decisions I have ever made in my life.
Pete Mallinson kept me informed of the progress of the
build. On January 20th he was
already planning the Paint and Finish phase of the operation… he had found an
Auto Body Shop that could scale down and do mandolin paint jobs. But by March there had been reversals in Mr.
Mallinson’s relations with this Auto Body Shop.
Apparently after having done a few good jobs for Mr. Mallinson, they
decided to speed up their process and save on their costs, and so quality began
to suffer. You see the trick to very
fine painting finishes is to have the finest atomized spray aerosol for the
thinnest possible coats, and then to allow each coat to completely dry before
adding more coats, taking as many as seven or eight color coats even before
getting to the Clear Coats. In that way
the paint does not pool or blob up. But
to save time a lot of Car Paint shops use Paint Guns with large apertures, and
use thick paint and globby paint mixtures with very little thinning solvent,
and they just try to blast it all on in just one or two coats. That is why in many car paint jobs, when you
get up close to the car, you can see the pooling and blobbing… that the paint
surface is not smooth with a uniform mirror finish. A good example of this kind of paint job is a
brand new $35000 American Motors Jeep – the paint jobs are so bad, up close,
that one gasps in horror and disgust.
Anyway, to get back to our primary narrative, we can guess
that the Auto Body Paint Shop had ruined a number of finishes for Mr. Mallinson
and that he had to take a number of instrument all the way back ‘down to wood’
and then paint them all over again himself.
And this brings us to
one of the Coldest and Dampest Winters (and Springs and Early Summers) in all
of English Recorded History. Yes,
Global Climate Change is REAL. You see, how
this applies to us is that even a very thin coat of paint needs to dry
relatively quickly, or stray particles of dust will land on the surface and
stick… and that looks simply awful. Some
paints can be sanded, such as expensive dope finishes. But most paints, well, you just need to keep
them out of the dust while the paint dries.
Mr. Mallinson does have a clean room for painting and drying, but such
rooms are extremely difficult to perfectly seal off. Then with all the added cold and damp, the
room would have to have been heated like a furnace to dry the paint coats in
time to minimize the dust particle problem, and that would have doubled his
Utility Bill, and he would have had to operate at a significant Loss. So he kept begging off completing the job because
of the Weather, and I agreed that it was indeed a problem and I understood and
that I could wait. Practice with the
Cheapy Mandolin was still going well but I saw I still had some way to go, so why should I be
in a hurry to get the best instruments, when the cheapy instrument I already has was still
teaching me plenty of tricks practice session after practice session.
Oh, but I was not just trusting what Mr. Mallinson was
telling me… I even started going to BBC Weather to get the Monthly Forecasts
for the entire British Isles, and, yes, Mr. Mallinson was telling the complete
truth. It had never been colder or
damper. It would have even discouraged
Winston Churchill – weather that could break even his most famous Will and make
him grovel in abject surrender before
the Elements. Yes, I would have
to wait.
Oh, in May, after having steadily practiced with the cheapy
Morgan Monroe Mandolin since November, as well as keeping up on my Bass and
guitars, I had worked myself into another one of my Repetitive Motion Injuries,
and would have to lay off of my stringed instruments for a while and go to just the
Keyboard and Harmonicas which require different muscles, tendons, and joints to
punish, while the other muscles, tendons, and joints have a chance to
recuperate . So I wrote to Pete and told
him that I expected to need about six weeks to recover, and so if he was backed
up with other clients as well as myself, that he had my leave to put others in
line ahead of me.
But the dampness continued into the summer and I began to
wonder if these Instruments could ever be finished, at their present price
point… that perhaps Mr. Mallinson would need to find a quality paint-shop in
Southern Italy, in arid Spain in even in North Africa, where it could reliably
be supposed that the weather would be reasonably dry and warm. Or he
would have to set up a Dust Free Dry Climate Controlled Oven Paint Room of his
own. But the added expense would have to
be taken up by somebody – we would no longer enjoy such affordable prices. But I kept these thoughts to myself and
simply waited. I came up with a cute pun
to express my concern… I would say to myself that that my mandolins were
‘Almuse finished’… get it? Like ‘almost finished’…
Then there was an ‘Oooops Email’. Somehow one of my instruments got ‘nicked’
and so it had to be taken ‘down to the wood’ and re-finished. I had thought so or something like it. Checking the English weather, it had been
warm and dry for several weeks in a row. What could be the hold-up, I thought.
I imagined in my mind’s eye that he must have found a rat in his
workshop and had thrown a rasp file or something at it, but the ad hoc
weapon had missed the rat, bounced off the floor, hit a corner, and ricocheted into
my poor defenseless Mandola. Well, I
admired Pete’s honesty. What can one
say… “rats happen”.
But then in July there was word that photos would soon be
taken, and then in August there were emails asking me to clarify string sizes
and tuning, and tips on setting up a Pay Pal account so I could pay across
International Exchanges. The mandolins were
not just ‘Almuse finished’… they were READY!
DHL shipping added to the cost, but they were here in just
over the weekend. They arrived on August
24th, nine months to the day I had sent in my first inquiry… like
having a Baby! Two Babies! In Pete’s emails he was calling them Little
and Larger.
Wow! They are
Beautiful. Superb quality. Excellent perceived value. One improvement could be with the large
screws that fasten down the String Termination Bar under the tail of the bridge
– they are not chromed. I could not get
perfect intonation at first, on the larger Mandola, and I am so happy that I
did not jump in and do Truss Bar adjustments right away (yes, the Mandola has a
truss bar, just like a real quality electric guitar), because, after a few days
of being tuned up and practiced with, I
noticed the intonation kept getting better and better until the intonation,
without any intervention from myself, simply LOCKED ON. This made me realize that Custom Instruments
are not just New, but VERY VERY VERY New.
They need to settle in for a bit. When I wrote to Pete about it, he said “Of
Course! From dreary England to the lush tropics, my poor babies (yes, he called
them his “babies” ) would have to settle in for a while before they could fully
realize their great good fortune and slap into perfect intonation (oh,
Intonation is determined by how well the Open Tuning of the instrument agrees
to the tuning once you start pushing down on the separate frets. Usually if the Open Tuning agrees with the
Double Dot tuning, being exactly one octave higher, then it passes the
test. You know, pressing down on
strings naturally sharpens the pitch, and so if I find an incurable case
of bad intonation on the sharp side, then I resolve it by instead of tuning on
the Open I tune at the 5th fret (guitar) or 7th fret
(mandolin) so that every fretted note will agree. But then, while actually playing, I have to seriously hesitate before playing any open note (it will be flat in whatever degree the intonation was off),
preferring to play the same note down on the neck of the next lower string.
Oh, I did have one funny problem not a week after the ‘babies’
arrived . Even though Pete had set the
slide switches back a bit, I was still sometimes accidentally turning off one
of the pickups, and so because my nerve damaged hand had gotten a bit better in
the last 9 months (thank you God) I moved my finger picking from between the
pickups to over the bridge (rear) pickup where I would be working further away
from the controls. Well, after several
hours of practicing like that, all Rock and Roll, and drinking London Dry Gin
in celebration to the Great U.K. that had brought me my new wonderful
instruments, I looked down and found that the bridge pickup was sunk into the body down on
one side. Bringing out my Tool Kit and taking
up the Pick Guard to get a closer look, I found I had smashed out the bracket
of the pickup that goes to the height adjust screw. The bracket was made out of PLASTIC!
Plastic!? Oh, God,
that was obviously going to be a weak link in the chain. I am famously ROUGH on my musical
instruments. Anything made out of
plastic, that starts out brittle enough in its Life but then gets more and more
brittle with each passing minute, well, it is simply marked for death the
moment it goes into my Music Studio… it may last a while, but ultimately,
certain death awaits for anything made of Plastic. Pete, well, now, I saw him as a friend. We exchanged stories. Christmas Cards. We made jokes. Yes, I was annoyed about plastic pickup
brackets, but I was not going to fire off some nasty email to my friend. First I would examine the problem and think
of a good ‘fix’. After I cooled off and
got positive, then I would let him know what was going on.
One thing I did not want to do was replace the pickup. It sounded fine, and it is made out of,
really expensive magnets and really good wire.
I did not want to have to simply throw that stuff into the trash bin…
Carbon Footprint and all that. What I
wanted do was to re-bracket the existing pickup and continue to use it. I scratched my head and drew up plans and
took them to my Friendly Island Guitar Repair guy, a Japanese Gentleman. He looked at it for 5 seconds and said, “Oh,
I just cut out piece of firm sponge or foam and lay it down in that groove
under the pickup, and it all be as good as fixed”. It was that easy. I felt stupid
and silly for having made up my elaborate plans. However, to be fair to myself, I had not undid
all the strings so I could fully take up the Pick Guard (it had already been
late the night before when the problem occurred and I had to put the
investigation off until later and catch up on my beauty sleep). When you look at the internal carvings and
cutouts (of surprisingly good quality by the way. I have had Chinese Instruments where the carved out sections had been done by hammer and chisel, and apparently with no more care than could be taken in just 5 or 10 minutes), and see how everything had been laid out, it becomes obvious that you only need to stick a sponge in the groove directly under the pickup.
Oh, but it did not end there, as there
is something funny about the Japanese Mentality… when I got the Mandola back the next day,
the screw hole was empty. Huh!? What!?
The Friendly Japanese Repair Man said, “Oh, screw hole broke, and Pickup
up on foam pad. You don’t NEED screw.” My God, it took 5 good minutes to convince
him that an empty screwhole next to a pickup makes it LOOK like something is
broken, and that LOOKING LIKE something is broken is, well, almost exactly the
same as actually BEING broken. ”So we
super glue screw in hole”, he finally says.
Well, thank God… I was thinking we would have to take out the dozen or
so Pick Guard screws, loosen the strings, lift out the pick guard and find a
nut to roll onto the end of that ‘missing’ screw to take up space and to make
everything seem Right with the Universe.
But with super glue, the job was completed in less time than it takes to
talk about it.
Oh, next morning, when I had indeed cooled off as I know I
would have, I had emailed Mr. Mallinson
about the break, and asked for his suggestion for fixing it, and then by that
same evening had emailed him again about the rather easy and elegant fix that
the Japanese Gentleman had been able to apply.
Mr. Mallinson confessed that he had been thinking of a complicated
bracket fix too, but then after learning of the Foam Pad idea, he recalled that
a number of instruments on the Market come with Foam Pads arranged in the instrument
body underneath the pickups, so that if
a bracket ever does break, no one would ever know the difference. But until now, he hadn’t thought about it
much. We all learn something new every
day. And you know the Pickup Height Adjustments
really aren’t all that important. You
see, the Height Adjustments on these pickups are there so that the pickups can
be interchanged between various instrument, but that if they are slid into
their position and brought up to the stop presented by the cut-to-fit hole in
the pick-guard then they are at their optimum height to begin with, and you
never need to adjust what is perfect to begin with. So, anyway, if you order a mandolin from
Almuse, that is, my friend Pete Mallinson, then clarify what the construction
of the pickup is, and if the bracket is plastic, simply remind him to cut a pad
and insert it into the slot under the pickup… I am sure he will know what you
are talking about.
Let me sum up by saying that these are splendid Mandolins,
but you should buy soon because I can’t see how Mr. Mallinson can hope to keep
prices as low as he has been setting them.
As word gets out, he will see more orders come in, and he will simply
have more work than he could ever hope to handle. At that point he can do one of two things –
he can raise prices to reduce demand, or he can go to the Bank and get a loan
for more capital equipment and to hire on a staff of skilled workers, so as to expand
his capacity. At least for the mean
time, I don’t see Mr. Mallinson significantly expanding his operation. I expect he will first raise his prices, and
THEN if demand continues to increase, he will be forced by Necessity, that
Great Mother of Invention, to go to the Bank and get the means to turn his
present little shop into an out right Factory.
Hey, Leo Fender, had started in his basement too.
Oh, but before I finish, let me add a word on Mandolin Coil
Pickup history. Electric Coil Pickups
for Mandolin never used to exist. As I recall from having read about it somewhere, Pete
used to have a real job but he worked on instruments as a hobby and it
intrigued him that no one had ever built an electric coil mandolin before. Guitar pickups are readily available but Guitar
pickups are larger and longer, and so he tried turning them almost
criss-cross to cover only the distance
required of a Mandolin, but they sounded ‘funny’. And so he decided that there just needed to
be special Mandolin pickups… requiring different sized magnets and wiring… all
to fit into the smaller scale. It took a
lot of trial and error, but finally he was getting the sound he wanted. Then he lost his Day Job. Capitalism was going through one of its Necessary
Corrections which, we are told, would ultimately benefit us all, but temporarily throw a lot
of us out of work. But Pete saw it as an opportunity to put his hobby pickups
on the Market. He would make his pass time activity pay the rent. Pete then became a One Man Musical World Revolution. I can bet that my favorite Dixie Chick,
Marty Maquire, was playing one of the first Almuse electric pickup mandolins
ever made when I saw her on the concert tape.
...........................................................
Update January 2014. I was emailing Mr. Pete Mallinson of Almuse in the U.K. and was placing another Custom Order and was detailing how we could work around and help secure the pickups against their weak plastic brackets, remembering that I had had one bracket break, oh, and incidentally, after 5 months of very strenuous practice, I had not been able to break a second bracket. Well, Mr. Mallinson told me that the problem should not be an issue in the future as he had instantly set out to procure stronger brackets of better material, and had re-built his existing stock and new pickups being built will be of the stronger materials.
Remembering that I use a pick-stick (two slats of wood glued together with picks at their tip) because my thumb and forefinger had been weakened sufficiently by a nerve pinch that I can not really hold and control a pick in the traditional manner, and in using a pick stick the lateral forces exerted on the strings is much higher than ordinary, well, I started experiencing a problem where the middle strings would jump the Nut. Often on guitars where the head stock comes straight off the neck, they install string trees or string guides or string guide bars in order to exert downward pressure on the strings after the Nut to keep them in place. This had not been a problem with the Mandola, which I mostly play and had not been aware of it till I started practicing with the Mandolin. Unfortunately there are not String Trees on the Market for Mandolin, nor are there specifically made String Guide Bars. You would probably have to do a little work to get them made in a local machine shop. But if you order a Custom Mandolin, or buy one 'on spec' from a catalog selection, look for the feature of the Head Stock being angled back. Mr. Mallinson wishes that people would ask for that feature, but when they ask for little Fender Look-a-like copies, well, he makes them with a straight head stock in order to be faithful to the Fender Design. Well, as they say, "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", and so when ordering a Custom design, whatever it is to look like, get him to angle back the Head Stock, as it will perform better, and NOBODY will notice that it is not exactly like a Telecaster or a Stratocaster. Oh, in regards to my Mandolin, well, I have secured the problem for now, first by placing string loops around the string pairs coming off the tuner pegs so that the strings will align straight to the Nut, and not at an angle (the strings always jump in the direction of the angle), and then between the first and second tuner pegs I had run a string over the center four strings and pulled it tight and tied it off under the head, to keep downward pressure on the strings behind the Nut... yes, it is an ugly fix, but it will work until I can get to a machine shop with drawings... OH! I got an email from Mr. Mallinson, and he informed me that he is sending me out some brass things he found in his Work Shop. When they arrive, I will take them to my friendly neighborhood guitar repair man and have them installed and let everybody know how they are working. But, after a week or so of playing the Mandolin with just the 'quick fix' strings tied in place (oh, use heavy string), well, I have quite gotten used to the ugliness, and rather think that it gives a certain look of lived with character.
Oh, more news. Mr. Mallinson has passed word... see his Facebook, I hear... that he is cutting off his Custom Order List and will begin to make instruments 'on spec', that is, for catalog selection. He explains that he uses up a great deal of time in consulting with customers on each and every detail of their Custom Instruments, and this same time could be used in simply turning out generally good and desirable instruments. Besides, I suspects he gets many inquiries which ask whether he just doesn't have any mandolins that can be purchased NOW. He hopes to start answering "Yes, and various Models to choose from". Now, I suppose I might have been lucky to have gotten there in time for my 'Custom' Mandolas, as I am not sure that Mandolas will be included in his catalogue. We all shall see.
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