Types of Mandolins: Body Shapes, Soundholes and the Whole Family

There are three separate questions hiding inside “what type of mandolin is this”, and the answers are independent of one another. What shape is the back — a deep bowl, a flat plate, or a carved arch? What is cut into the top — one oval hole, or two f-holes? And where does the instrument sit in the family — mandolin, mandola, octave mandolin, mandocello?

Get those three straight and every mandolin you meet sorts itself. A carved-top A-style with f-holes and a carved-top F-style with f-holes sound close to identical, because the only thing separating them is the outline. A carved-top A-style with an oval hole sounds like a different instrument.

The mandolin family at a glance

All of them are tuned in fifths and all of them take a pick, so the fingering patterns transfer whole. Learn the mandolin and you can play a mandocello badly the same afternoon.

The back is where the real division is

Three constructions, three completely different instruments, and they are separated by centuries rather than by taste.

Bowl-back, or Neapolitan

The original. A deep back built from a dozen or more thin ribs bent and glued into a bowl, a soundboard that is creased rather than flat, and an oval soundhole. This is the mandolin Beethoven wrote for, and it is still what a classical mandolin orchestra plays.

It sounds sweet, complex and quiet, with a fast decay that makes tremolo essential rather than decorative. It is also awkward: the bowl has no flat surface anywhere on it, so the instrument slides off your leg and has to be held rather than rested. That, plus the fact that it is quiet, is why it lost North America to the carved archtop and never got it back.

Buying one is the hard part. A bowl-back is fiddly to build and the market for it is small, so the mainstream retailers carry nothing worth owning — what turns up there is unbranded imports with no track record behind them. Go to an early-music or classical-mandolin specialist and expect four figures for something good, or take your chances on the second-hand market, where Suzukis and older German-built instruments come up regularly.

Flat-back

A genuinely flat back and a flat or lightly-braced top, built like a small guitar. Usually an oval or round soundhole, often a wider fingerboard. These are the “Irish” or “folk” mandolins, and they are the ones you see in a session rather than on a bluegrass stage.

The sound is open, woody and sustaining, with much less attack than a carved top — good for playing long streams of notes, poor at cutting through a banjo. Trinity College, Gold Tone and Ashbury are the names to look for. The same construction scales up: most octave mandolins and nearly every Irish bouzouki is a flat-back.

Carved archtop

Top and back each carved from a solid block of wood and arched like a violin’s, with the thickness graduated by hand across the plate. Orville Gibson patented this in 1898 and it is the reason American mandolins sound the way they do: an arched, graduated plate under string pressure is far louder and more responsive than a flat one.

Every A-style and F-style mandolin is this construction, which makes “flat-back” a poor label for an A-style — its back is arched too. The genuinely flat one is the folk mandolin above, and it is a different instrument.

Under about $200 the arch is pressed into a sheet of laminate rather than carved from a block, which gets you the shape without the acoustics. That is not automatically wrong — it is a perfectly reasonable way to find out whether you like the instrument — but it will sound the same in ten years as it does on day one. Solid tops open up with playing. Laminate ones do not.

A-style and F-style: the same instrument, different outline

An A-style is a teardrop. An F-style has a carved scroll curling off the upper bass side and two points on the body. Both were Orville Gibson’s designs, both use the same carved construction, and on two instruments from the same maker at the same level the difference in sound is small enough that it disappears against the variation between individual instruments.

What the scroll changes is the price, and by how much depends entirely on whether a machine or a person is cutting it. A CNC router does not care that the outline has a curl in it, so on factory instruments the scroll is close to free — The Loar prices its LM-110 and LM-310F identically at around $400, same top, same woods, same shop. Where a person carves and binds the scroll by hand it is slow, skilled work and the premium is large: Kentucky lists its Standard A-model at $825 and its Standard F-model at $1,795.

The scroll does one practical thing: it gives you somewhere to hook the instrument against your leg when you play sitting down. Some players find that alone worth the money. The other reason F-styles dominate bluegrass is Bill Monroe, who played a 1923 Gibson F-5 and made it the shape the music is pictured in.

So the advice depends on the budget. Under about $500 the scroll costs you nothing and you should buy whichever shape you prefer — at $400 The Loar will sell you a hand-carved top in either body. Above roughly $700 the money that would have gone into the scroll goes into the instrument instead, and the A-style is the better buy for anyone who does not specifically want the shape.

There is more on the two shapes in A-style vs F-style.

The soundhole is the choice that changes the sound

Two f-holes or one oval hole. This is a bigger tonal decision than A versus F, and it is not really about the holes — it is about where they force the bridge to sit.

An f-hole instrument has its bridge further down the body, leaving a long narrow strip of soundboard free to vibrate. That favors the upper mids and gives the chop its edge. An oval hole sits where the fingerboard ends, so the bridge moves up and the vibrating area becomes shorter and wider, which favors the bottom end. The knock-on effect is the neck: an f-hole mandolin gives you fifteen frets clear of the body, an oval-hole one gives you twelve. If you play high up the neck, that is not a small thing.

Whatever the shape, it is tuned G–D–A–E from the bass side, the same as a violin. A clip-on chromatic like the D’Addario Micro at around $20 handles every instrument on this page, and a spare set of D’Addario EJ74s at around $10 is worth having before you need it.

Mandola, octave mandolin, mandocello

Same instrument, bigger, lower. All three are tuned in fifths and played with a pick, and every shape you know on a mandolin is the same shape here — it just names different notes on the mandola and the mandocello, which start on C rather than G.

Scale length is what actually separates them, and it is the number to check when a listing is vague about what it is selling. A mandolin is around 14 inches from nut to bridge. A mandola is 15½ to 17. An octave mandolin is 19 to 24, most often around 21. A mandocello is 24¾ to 27 — guitar territory.

The naming is a genuine trap, because Britain and America use different words for the same instruments. What Americans call a mandola, the British call a tenor mandola. What Americans call an octave mandolin, the British call an octave mandola. British “tenor mandolin” means something else again. Read the tuning and the scale length in the specification, not the name on the headstock.

Of the three, the octave mandolin is the one most people end up wanting. It fills the same role in Irish and folk music that a rhythm guitar fills elsewhere — big open chords underneath, with enough definition left to take a tune — and it sits between the mandolin and the bouzouki without being either. Push the scale past about 24 inches and add a longer neck and you have crossed into bouzouki territory.

The mandola is the family’s least-loved member: too close to the mandolin to feel like a new instrument, not low enough to do the octave mandolin’s job. It earns its place in a mandolin orchestra and rarely anywhere else. The mandocello has a beautiful voice and almost no repertoire outside ensembles, and it costs about what a good F-style costs. Neither is a first instrument, and both are built in small enough numbers that you will usually be ordering rather than choosing from a shelf.

Electric mandolins

Two different things get sold under this heading and they are not interchangeable.

An acoustic-electric is an ordinary acoustic mandolin with a pickup fitted under the bridge. Unplugged it is exactly the instrument it was; plugged in it is louder. This is what almost everyone actually needs — the same mandolin works at home and through a PA — and it adds very little to the price. A Vangoa A-style lands around $145 with a pickup fitted; the listing sells acoustic and acoustic-electric versions side by side, so choose the acoustic-electric option rather than assuming.

A solid-body electric is a different instrument. There is no soundbox, so it is nearly silent unplugged, and through an amp it behaves like an electric guitar: sustaining, compressed, happy with distortion and effects, with none of the acoustic bark. Four-string and five-string versions exist, the five adding a low C. It is a tool for rock, blues and country lead playing, not a quieter way to practice.

What they are made of, and what it changes

Spruce for the top, almost universally — it is stiff along the grain and light, which is the combination an arched soundboard needs. Maple for the back and sides on carved instruments, because it is hard and reflective and pushes the sound forward; mahogany or sapele on cheaper ones, which is warmer and softer-edged. Ebony or rosewood for the fingerboard and bridge on anything decent, and dyed hardwood standing in for them further down.

Three things are worth more than the wood species when you are comparing instruments.

• Solid or laminate. A laminate top is thin veneer over plywood. It works, it is stable, and it stops improving the day it is built. A solid top gets better for years.
• Carved or pressed. Both are “solid” tops. A pressed one is a flat sheet bent into an arch under heat; a carved one is cut from a thick block and graduated so the thickness varies across the plate. Carved is the one that gives you the chop, and around $400 is where it starts.
• The bridge. A mandolin bridge is not glued down — it is a floating two-piece bridge held in place by string tension, with thumbwheels for adjusting the action. If it is one solid piece with no adjustment, the instrument cannot be set up properly.

Whatever you buy will need a setup before it plays well, and on cheaper instruments that matters more than anything in the specification. Budget for it, or learn to do it. Our guide to what your money actually buys at each price goes into where the jumps are.

Most mandolins ship without a case. This padded gig bag, around $45, is cut to take either an A-style or an F-style — most bags are shaped for one or the other, and an A-style bag will not close over a scroll.

Where the shapes came from

The mandolin is a descendant of the lute, by way of the small Baroque mandolino. Its modern form starts in Naples: Gaetano Vinaccia is credited with a bowl-back prototype around 1744, and four generations of Vinaccias refined it from there. The decisive change came in 1835, when Pasquale Vinaccia deepened the bowl, extended the fingerboard to seventeen frets, fitted geared tuning machines in place of friction pegs, and strung the instrument in steel. Louder, brighter, in tune, and with a range worth writing for — that is the Neapolitan mandolin that traveled.

It reached America sideways. A Spanish student ensemble called the Estudiantina Fígaro opened at Booth’s Theatre in New York in February 1880 and was a sensation. They were playing bandurrias, not mandolins — but the two look alike, the press called them mandolins, and Italian-American musicians who owned actual mandolins formed imitation troupes to meet the demand. The instrument was fashionable in America before most Americans had seen one.

Orville Gibson, working in Kalamazoo, Michigan, patented the answer to the bowl-back in 1898: carve the top and back from solid wood and arch them like a violin’s. The result was dramatically louder, and it held its shape. He drew it in two outlines — the plain teardrop and the scrolled one — and those became the A-style and the F-style.

The last piece was Lloyd Loar, Gibson’s acoustic engineer from 1919 until December 1924. He replaced the oval hole with violin f-holes, moved the bridge down the body, lengthened the neck and floated the fingerboard clear of the top. The F-5 that came out of it went into production in 1922, and Loar personally signed and dated every one built until he left. Bill Monroe bought a 1923 example, built bluegrass around its chop, and fixed the sound and the silhouette of the American mandolin for the next century.

So which type do you want

Bluegrass, country or old-time: a carved archtop with f-holes, A-style unless you have the budget to spare. Irish, folk or singer-songwriter: an oval hole, either carved or flat-back, and consider an octave mandolin instead if you mostly want to accompany. Classical, Baroque or Neapolitan repertoire: a bowl-back, bought from a specialist. Not sure yet: a laminate A-style for around $130, and decide once you know.

Whichever you land on, our beginner picks go through the instruments themselves, and tuning is the first thing to sort out once it arrives.

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