Tale of the First Wiens Mandocello

In November 2019 I was happy to meet Mike Marshall and his wife Caterina Lichtenberg in Leer Germany at an Organ-builder’s anniversary celebration they performed at. As we visited, Mike described how he had just been through a traumatic event. On a recent flight back to Germany, a well known major Airline had lost his iconic Monteleone Mandocello! Yes, it was the one he’s known for playing on countless recordings and in live performances. It’s whereabouts were unknown for over a week after his flight back to Germany. I know what you’re thinking… If you needed that instrument to perform and record regularly like Mike does, what would you do? It’s not like good Mandocellos are readily available wherever you go. Nevermind one custom built for you by Mr. John Monteleone. And even if you are a high profile player or somebody that could afford one of Mr. Monteleone’s in today’s market, I’m not sure you could even have one built given his current schedule and inevitable limits of his long building life.

 

Before I go any further, Let me reassure you that Mike got his instrument back unscathed. but it wasn’t before he probably suffered all the usual stages of loss. The shock and pain, the anger with the airline and depression and helplessness one feels when dealing with the mechanisms of a huge corporation. By the sounds of it he had reached the classic acceptance stage and was ready to start looking for a replacement. So during our conversation that evening the idea of me building a mandocello came about and Mike really encouraged me the same way he does with so many musicians around the world.

Thus the seed was planted. I returned home and started to think about all the aspects of mandocello design that every other builder had considered before me. Size, shape, scale, and of course something that sounded good. I also wanted to explore the mandolin shaped mandocellos and their particular sound, as opposed to the guitar-shaped mandocellos that are more common .

 

 

Soundport

The idea of a side port soundhole has also been on my radar for some time. John Monteleone famously incorporated side ports into his archtop guitars years ago and the idea caught on with many players and thus builders. The presence and monitor effect can really inspire the player when they can hear themselves so clearly. I knew I wanted to do something a bit different with how it was built into the instrument though. More like a ported speaker cabinet. More directional and not just a hole cut into a bent side.

I’m a traditionalist, I’m not known for making anything modern and I knew I wasn’t going to try to reinvent the wheel in any significant way with this mandocello, but thought I’d like to step out of my comfort zone and have some fun with this project. I thought I might approach this as a sort of “What if?’ idea.. As in “what if they’d made a few alternate design decisions 100 years ago in Kalamazoo. What if the time/space continuum somehow skipped a tooth and they had carbon fiber to work with back then. What if soundports were in demand, and exotic woods were “de rigueur” as they are now on high end instruments.

Anyway, for better or worse that was the idea. And with the unexpected pandemic I finally had the time to begin this flight of fancy.

The Wood Hunt

I’m primarily a mandolin builder and repairman by trade. No day job, and no wife bringing home the bacon, so money is always tight and this Mandocello project has no end buyer at this point. It’s merely a project that has percolated between my ears for a decade, and one that as an artist, I must simply move ahead on. Like a musician who can no longer stifle a song that wants to be sung….. Only with mandocellos there’s alot of time & expensive components that will have to be acquired.

I don’t have a huge selection of wood on hand and certainly none for a larger archtop project like this. I did however have some nice Honduran mahogany that had been sitting around for a decade or so and I thought would make a great Gibson-style 3-piece neck like you’d see on K-4 mandocellos of the early 1900’s. I had enough to make the instrument’s internal blocks too. So that was covered.

For the soundboard, I knew I wanted a nice European or possibly adirondack spruce as those are species I’m very familiar with both tonally and structurally, and I love the creamy look as well.

As far as back & sides, I knew I wanted to use some lighter-weight European or possibly American Red maple because this instrument was quite large and intended to be very resonant and loose down low. That was not something I had on hand unfortunately. Living out in the middle of Alberta, 1000km from any decent wood stash during the Covid lockdown, meant buying the wood for this project long distance, over the phone or internet. Ask any luthier and they’ll tell you that even with with the wood in your hand, it’s always crap shoot. You can’t know if the wood will be suitable until you have it cut and under your scraper. It may be too stiff or too soft, have excessive runout or other hidden flaws that make it unusable…And no matter what, it’s always very expensive.

 

After asking around and balking at alot of high priced archtop wood, I finally made a call to an eastern european character who is a known importer of Carpathian Spruce. He had some beautiful fine-grained stuff by the looks of it , so I made a deal for some soundboards (I never buy just one in case there’s a problem with one). He also mentioned he had some old Carpathian maple back & sides sets that were a bit small for a large archtop, and that I could get a good price on them. After looking at some pictures of some very oxidized flamed maple, I took him up on it.

 

The wood arrived a few weeks later and I was fairly happy. The Carpathian spruce soundboard was fantastic. Fine grained, creamy colour, stiff and fairly lightweight with just a little runout. The Eastern Euro maple back and sides were a very nice light and extremely well-cured. The flame figure wasn’t particularly pronounced as you often see in North American maple species, but I know that wild figure is often chosen at the expense of the plate’s function. The density can vary wildly and it’s certainly is more difficult to carve.

The sides I received were a problem however. The sawyer must’ve gotten a bit greedy and cut them too thin for me to use. They were only .085″ thick and still had oxidation and saw marks that would have to go. So back to my own wood stash to dig around. Luckily I had some very nice Eastern Sugar maple sides that would work. They exhibited some strong flame figure, so they weren’t a great match for the back. But I knew they’d make a very sturdy rim even if they were a bit too pretty.

As I started to consider the fingerboard and peghead veneers, I thought it might be interesting to go in a more exotic direction than the usual Ebony. This was to be a slightly wild take on an old Gibson after all. So why not some swirling choclatey figured grain? I happened to have a couple spare pieces of ziricote from another project that would make a very sexy fingerboard and enough scrap to make a matching peghead veneer.

So I had my wood for the project and I could finally begin the mandocello Journey in earnest. It was time to finalize my design. Make whatever templates I needed. Build my body mould etc.

The Design

Cooking up body and peghead shapes was a fun and creative process. But it took many weeks of work with paper & pencil with countless revisions. The body shape I settled on is actually very close overall to a scaled up F4/F5 mandolin . The elongated scroll and unusual points disguise that fact, but it is essentially that very familiar shape and proportion with the hollow third point being the only truly original feature. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before. The rest of the body incorporates style points that were seen on old Gibbys but never in this combination. The peghead also incorporates a couple vestigial features from the heady days in Kalamazoo, with a a rather extreme scroll and the rarely seen “nubs” at the base of the peghead.

The Build

Construction began with the 3-piece neck blank getting laminated and its traditional one-piece compression truss rod installed between two carbon fiber stiffening rods that run the length of the fingerboard and even past the nut to provide ultimate stiffness to this slim mahogany neck. The bookmatched ziricote peghead veneer was first shaped then glued in place prior to being bound as is my preferred technique. I had no more ziricote on hand so the back of the peghead is veneered with a piece of macassar ebony which colour-matched quite nicely.

After building a template and custom hinged body mold for the unique body shape. I could commit to starting the body. The rim build was tedious with it’s highly figured hand-bent sides deciding to crack on the bending iron at least once. I’m used to that sort of thing of course. The major departure with this mandocello design was the soundport I’d envisioned, located in the third Point near the scroll. I felt it wise to build some carbon fiber reinforcement into the sides where I’d be hollowing out the soundport quite thin.

Since this is a one-off instrument, the Carpathian spruce soundboard was carved by hand with chisel and plane. I just eyeballed the arching and recurve, occasionally checking with a dial indicator for symmetry. When it came to the back I used a Kutzall disc mounted on an angle grinder followed by scrapers. Again I mostly eyeballed the arching. The one unknown when I started carving was how to treat the soundport area. In a moment of inspiration I carved it into a flairing volute shape. Like a spout. I quite liked the idea and applied it to the back for a very interesting final shape almost like a horn.

The Carpathian spruce soundboard was graduated then braced with adirondack spruce in a unique V style tone bar arrangement with one major cross member between the soundhole and the bridge and one small brace above the soundhole. Glue up of the instrument’s components was done entirely with hot hide glue, except the carbon fiber which was bonded with epoxy.

The peghead inlay was a bit of a stumbling block for me. I wanted something that could’ve been period correct in the early 1900’s but that wasn’t an obvious victorian type pattern you might see from Gibson. Remember this is a Mandocello from a parallel universe. It occurred to me that the Egyptomania that had swept the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries might be a good basis for a design and came up with a lotus idea based on some ancient Egyptian art. The inlay is hand-cut from natural shell, mother of pearl and abalone.

The finish was undecided until quite late in the build. A friend showed me a picture of a very deep red stain on an old Gibby Style O guitar and it sort of captivated me. I’m not one for red coloured instruments usually but I guess the intensity of the stain and the fact that it would be period correct for this instrument sold me on it. I did my usual chemical staining treatment followed by hand applied stains and got a very satisfying result. I followed this with nitro lacquer except on the neck which is stripped back to the wood and lightly sealed with French polished shellac. This allows for a very fast neck that is never sticky.

Hardware and Case

The tailpiece was the final major unknown. I knew I didn’t want a typical mandolin tailpiece but rather something like a trapeze but not a trapeze. I thought of the slick ebony bodied ones with a violin tailgut that you see on some finer archtop guitars, but that still wasn’t quite appropriate in my mind. I wanted something that could take loop-end OR ball-end strings. Most importantly I wanted a straight path over the bridge from the tailpiece. No spreading of the strings as you see on most instruments. After hammering out a brass prototype, I worked with CAD expert Ben Pearce to design and 3D print a tailpiece in nickel-plated stainless steel. I then made a wooden cover from ziricote that houses a strip of damping material across the leading edge. It also matches the peghead and fingerboard and evokes the appearance of some old Gibson trapeze tailpieces.