Guitar Lovers

Last year, a guitarist named Dave Carroll was travelling across the country with his band. He was waiting for his flight to leave Chicago when he notices the baggage handlers throwing guitar cases to each other – his band’s guitar cases! Upon arriving in Nebraska, he discovered that his Taylor guitar had been smashed. United Airlines did nothing to help Carroll, despite his repeated requests and complaints. So he recently wrote and performed a song called “United Breaks Guitars,” which got more than 3 million views in its first 10 days on YouTube.

United Airlines has probably learned its lesson after the whole world knows that its employees broke someone’s guitar. But the point of this story is that not everyone will handle your guitar as carefully and lovingly as you do, so you should invest in a good guitar case. Even though Carroll’s case didn’t prevent his guitar from being ruined, his situation was the exception – few people would actually throw someone’s guitar like that. In general, a good guitar case will prevent damage to your guitar. Don’t leave home without one!

A mandolin’s typically hollow wooden body has a neck with a flat (or slight radius) fretted fingerboard, a nut and floating bridge, a tailpiece or pinblock at the edge of the face to which the strings are attached, and mechanical tuning machines, rather than friction pegs, to accommodate metal strings. Like the guitar, the mandolin has relatively poor sustain; that is, the sound from a plucked string decays quickly.

A note cannot be maintained for an arbitrary length of time as with a bowed note on a violin. Its small size and higher pitch makes this problem more severe than with the guitar, and the use of tremolo (rapid picking of one or more pairs of strings) is often used to create a sustained note or chords. This technique works particularly well with a mandolin’s paired strings, where one of the pair is sounding while the other is being struck by the pick, giving a more rounded and continuous sound than is possible with a single coursed instrument.