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| These articles were first published in the "Mandolin
Quarterly" <http://www.mandolincafe.com/strings/mq.html>
and are reproduced here with the kind permission of Norman Levine.
The "Mandolin Quarterly" is an extremely informative
journal for mandolin enthusiasts, and is available for subscription sale
off of their web site! This is a definite "must read"!!!
Excerpts from an interview with Marilynn Mair Q: Tell me about your instrument, what kind of sound you are looking for, the strings you use, and so on. I am struck by the fact that different professional players all seem to have differnt types of picks, wrist positions, and personal techniques. What are your thoughts on all this? MM: For years now I have played
a Lyon & Healy A model, 1920's, carved top & back, short scale
and curved fingerboard. When anything happens to knock it out of commission
I have a couple of back-ups, but they give me less of the sound I want.
I've searched for a long time in vain for a matching vintage Lyon &
Healy, so a year and a half ago I decided to try a different approach and
commissioned Doug Woodely, the Toronto-area luthier, to build me a new
instrument based on my old one. it wasn't to be a clone; I wanted Doug's
"Chicago" model, but built to the measurements of my orignal, to try to
duplicate it's sound and feel.
Ontario's "Mister Mandolin":
Q: Well, let's start off with where Guelph is! A: Guelph (pronounced 'Gwelf') is about an hour's drive northwest of downtown Toronto, in the Province of Ontario. Q: You'll be our first Canadian luthier in this series of interviews for MQ. How about some back ground on you musical background, and why you decided to concentrate on the mandolin. A: My father was a musician, and I started playing
piano at an early age. Like a lot of kids, I guess, I was more interested
in being outside playing ball. After a few years of piano my musical interests
mostly consisted of listening to music, but by the time I was 17 or 18
my sister became interested in the mandolin. Since most of my friends played
guitar that was about the last thing I wanted to learn, so I decided to
learn to play the mandolin; at first just tinkering with it and then more
seriously.
A: Yes, it's about a 4-hour drive; there's nothing
else any closer with that kind of selection. I fell in love with the sound
of this beautiful K-2 mandocello, so I was on a quest to find a mandocello
I could afford. All of the ones I saw were out of my price range, but I
had seen a picture of a K-5
Q: How did that come out? A: Surprisingly well, considering it's
humble beginnings. It didn't compare in sound to the better Gibsons of
old, but it suited my needs and was the only mandocello I had. It's still
in use, in fact. This project gave me my first experience in calculating
fret positions, because I made the neck a non- standard length which wouldn't
have worked with any of the pre-slotted fingerboard blanks, and I had to
develop my own formula. Shortly after that, I bought an F-5 mandolin kit
from Stewart-MacDonald, and that was the first mandolin I put together
and it's still the one that I play. I did a lot of research on violin construction
at that time, mostly at the library and whatever else I could dig up, and
learned a lot in building that first instrument.
A: Yes; practical things such as calculating fret positions, making things fit with very close tolerances, detailed design considerations probably come more naturally to me than they would to some people. Although I learned a great deal as a machinist and applied that to many of my hobbies, I really never liked doing it. Working with hot metal and oily, greasy parts was not my idea of a good time. Once I started working in wood I found it a lot more to my liking than working metal, although such experience as mold-making has served me well and saved me some time. Q: As I recall, you told me that your brother has continued to find vintage instruments for you. A: He's great at finding these things, like my Lyon and Healy Style
A, Gibson A, Martin 0-18 and some others. Really, my whole collection of
vintage instruments is due to him. He knows and keeps in touch with a lot
of people, and follows up on the leads. He's the one who introduced me
to Grant MacNeill at the Twelfth Fret in Toronto, one of Canada's really
great music stores, and Grant was quite interested first in my mandocello
and then in that first F-5. In fact when he saw the F-5 he said, "Build
two of them, and I'll sell one for you." He knew what the market would
handle and thought it would sell.
Q: I understand that when it's done right, this can take almost as long as building the instrument itself. A: It certainly can when you're learning how to do it. I feel like I have a good foundation now, and I have spent a lot of time with other builders and analyzed a lot of instruments, studying how they were constructed and finished. Q: Do you use tone bars or x-bracing on your instruments? A: So far, on my f-hole mandolins I have used tone bars. I'd like to experiment with cross-bracing, but I've really found very few cross-braced mandolins which had the kind of tone I'm looking for. I prefer the warm tones I get from the tone bars. My oval-hole instruments have the single lateral brace. Cross bracing produces a distinct tone which the bluegrass players seem to like, but to me there's too much of a harsh, metallic midrange. Q: What about finishes? A: I've taken an unusual route, in that I've used polyurethane varnish so far. I started using that on the advice of a violin-builder who makes very fine instruments and uses that for the finish. My mandocello and first mandolin were both lacquer finished, but I've found that if you can get the polyurethane to go on thin enough it makes for a very satisfactory result. It remains very flexible, but it doesn't touch up very well - doesn't bond to itself as well as nitrocellulose - and it doesn't wet sand very easily. So, I'm starting now to use spirit varnish and I'm experimenting with different types of hand-rubbed finishes. Varnish has become the finish of choice among the top builders, and that's what a lot of buyers of top-quality mandolins are looking for. (note from Twelfth Fret; Woodley has since switched to a French Polish applied varnish) Q: Do you use forms and cutting machines to copy out your carved tops and backs? A: Not so far - I've carved them all by hand, and this is something I've really enjoyed. Now that I have made the decision to get into this business as a living, I'm going to need to get some of that equipment for a least roughing out the tops and backs. Q: What's your target for production? How many would you like to be able to make in a year? A: I'd like to do twenty to twenty-four per year. Right now, I'm working on designs for other instruments, standardizing my forms and templates, learning how to do more than one at each stage of the building process. Next year I expect I'll turn out a dozen or so, then increase production as I learn how to do that without sacrificing quality. Q: And you've taken time out to make instruments like this beautiful copy of the Lyon and Healy Model A. A: I did that design four years ago but never had time to work on it until recently. It took a long time, for example, to work out just how I wanted that peghead to look, once I decided not to use the standard L&H peghead. I'm pleased with the way it turned out, and I want it to be a part of my product line. There are not many Luther's making that style of mandolin right now, and my feeling is that it could be a popular offering. I'll continue to build the F-5 and A-5 styles as well, of course Q: What do expect your distribution channels to be? Does the Twelfth Fret continue to be your main display showplace? A: As far as display, yes. They've been after
me since those first mandolins, for the last couple of years, to get them
more instruments. I like to have instruments with them, because I get good
exposure with the instruments there on the wall. It's a way to get a lot
of advertising and feedback, and name recognition. People now come in asking
about Woodley instruments pretty regularly.
Q: One feature I notice about your instruments is the use of wood bindings. A: I wanted to differentiate myself from other
builders, and this is one rather distinctive feature that people notice.
The first A-style I built used wood bindings just to be different, and
a bit more 'classy'. The price of vintage Gibson A's is still low enough
that it's tough to compete with them, and differentiating your product
os one way to get people's attention.
A: Actually, after a lot of experimenting I
hit on using five plies of black-dyed pearwood, though you can't
tell it from a single strip of wood. I especially like the effect of the
black wood binding against the blonde instrument. I'm starting to use ebony
binding now, though that's a bit dicier to deal with.
Q: You have gotten away from the truss rod in these later instruments. What are you using as a neck reinforcement - carbon graphite? A: On the twelve fret instruments that I'm working on now, I'm using carbon graphite. I think it has great potential both in terms of stability and in keeping the weight down. For one thing, installing a truss rod is really a pain, and while they're useful in straightening a bowed neck if that becomes necessary, if you think about it, a mandolin really has a short, stout neck which if reinforced properly to begin with should not develop that kind of problem. Some people are skeptical about that, but I'm comfortable with at least the 12 fret necks and I'd at least like to make it optional. I use a considerable amount of pressure in fret insertion as well, which also is a factor in neck bowing. Q: Do you feel the source of carbon rod vs. truss rod has and effect on the tone? A: There's certainly a lot of debate about what affects the tone in building an instrument. My feeling is that just about everything you do has an effect on the tone one way or another, and if comes down to whether the combination of things you do sums up to a good effect or a bad one. That's a real challenge - trying to figure out what it is that people really want in a mandolin. Some are looking for warmth, some for subtlety, some for balance, and for some the only thing that matters is volume. If everybody wanted the same thing and I know what it was, mandolin-making would be a lot easier. I'm shooting for a balance between good volume and warmth in tone. Q: How about tap-tuning. Where are you with that? A: When I started building I based my designs
and techniques on Siminoff's book. I've never really been able to achieve
the exact frequencies Roger has in the book, and I've learned that I can
affect the tone the way I want to by slight shifts in tonebar placement,
or tonebar shaping, so I haven't relied a lot on tap-tuning. Really, as
soon as you glue a tuned top to a rim assembly, and then glue an the back,
you change the dynamics. Bob Benedetto does his tuning, as I understand
it, on the assembled body, which makes more sense to me. I look forward
to having the time to experiment with this to see if I think it really
does make a difference.
A: Yes, everything I do is of my own design.
I cut the bridges by hand and custom-fit them to the instruments. The width
of the foot is a bit different from the manufactured ones, and I spend
a lot of time insuring that the feet have perfect contact with the top.
The pickguards are ebony, and so are the fixed clamps. I'm constantly looking
for a tailpiece that I like, and haven't really found one that suits me.
What I did on this (the L&H style) is to use and ebony 'nut' on the
bottom of the instrument and secure the strings to metal pins. Then, the
cover goes over that . It works well, and it's another stylistic touch
that sets my instruments apart from others.
Maxwell McCullough
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