Mandolins grew louder when metal strings replaced gut
The mandolin—“small mandola”—is a lute-family instrument usually plucked with a pick, often with four unison courses for eight strings. Neapolitan bowl backs, carved archtops, and flat backs dominate today’s shapes, after quieter gut-and-quill ancestors.
Regional cousins vary string counts: four-string Brescian types tuned in fifths; six-string Milanese lines in fourths; twelve-string courses elsewhere. Italian seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gitterns and mandores/mandolas fed the Neapolitan and Lombard lines that spread widest. The Genoese version has six doubled courses, and the tricordia uses four triple courses, twelve strings in all.
A resonator body—bowl or box—meets a neck; strings run from machines to a tailpiece across a floating bridge pressed by tension. Notes die faster than on guitar, so players lean on tremolo to sustain singing lines. Italian bowl-backed instruments such as the Neapolitan count as necked bowl lutes, while archtops and flatbacks are necked box lutes.
Standard tuning copies the violin, G3, D4, A4, E5, in fifths, and like the violin the mandolin is the soprano of a family running down through mandola, octave mandolin and mandocello to mandobass. Steel strings are the usual and cheapest choice. Each body style has its own sound and repertoire. The Neapolitan, built from glued wooden strips into a deep bowl, shines in European classical music and in Andean music of Peru. Carved archtops dominate American folk, old-time and bluegrass. Guitar-like braced flatbacks serve Irish, British and Brazilian folk and Mexican estudiantinas. Early examples were quiet, strung with gut and plucked with fingers or a quill; modern metal strings press much harder on the top, so soundboards, round or teardrop-shaped, often with f-holes or a rosette, are now built to bear that load.
Source: Mandolin
