How Many Types of Mandolin Are There?
Eight. And the musical mandolin is tuned exactly like a violin — same four notes, same fifths, just plucked instead of bowed. Looking for the kitchen slicer or the Miami restaurant? Both covered below.
Quick Answer
8 types of mandolin in regular use: A-style, F-style and bowl-back acoustic mandolins, the electric mandolin, plus the four other family members — mandola, octave mandolin, mandocello and mandobass. The mandolin has 4 courses of 2 strings each (8 strings total) tuned G-D-A-E — exactly like a violin. The instrument plucks; the violin bows. Looking for the kitchen slicer, the Miami restaurant, the Bruce Hornsby song or the band Mandolin Orange? All sorted near the bottom.
The mandolin is a violin you pluck
Below: the four open strings of a mandolin, tuned G-D-A-E in fifths — identical to a violin. Each "course" is actually two strings tuned to the same pitch, plucked together. Below that: a single pluck on D, then the same D played as a tremolo — the rapid pick alternation that lets a plucked instrument sustain a melody.
The same G-D-A-E that every violin in the world is tuned to. Mandolin and violin are the same tuning, doing different jobs.
A single plucked note dies in about a second. The tremolo — twelve to sixteen picks per second, alternating down-up-down-up — strings those decaying plucks together fast enough that the ear hears a continuous melodic line. That is the only way a mandolin can play a sustained tune.
The doubled strings (two tuned to the same pitch, plucked together) give the real mandolin its slightly chorused sound that no single oscillator can reproduce. Synth here approximates with two detuned voices per note.
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The mandolin family is the violin family — plucked
The orchestral string section has four core instruments: violin (G-D-A-E), viola (C-G-D-A), cello (C-G-D-A an octave lower) and double bass (E-A-D-G, an exception). The mandolin family is the same four instruments, with one design change — every string is doubled into a paired course, and instead of horsehair on the strings the player uses a flat plectrum.
Mandolin = violin tuning, soprano voice, G3-D4-A4-E5. Mandola = viola tuning, alto voice, C3-G3-D4-A4. Octave mandolin / octave mandola = tenor voice, a full octave below the mandolin. Mandocello = cello tuning, bass voice, C2-G2-D3-A3. Mandobass = double bass tuning, contrabass voice — rare today, but it existed (the Gibson J Mandobass, 1912–1930, was a working instrument).
A mandolin player who can play a violin part can play it on the mandolin without rewriting it — the notes are in the same place on the fingerboard. The two instruments are fingerboard-identical. That is why mandolin players can sight-read violin music, and bluegrass fiddle tunes translate so easily onto mandolin: it is the same fingering, with a pick instead of a bow.
The 8 mandolin types in working use
Four body styles of the standard mandolin, plus the four other family voices.
| Type | Tuning | Where you find it |
|---|---|---|
| A-style mandolin | G-D-A-E | Teardrop body, no scroll. Folk, Celtic, beginner playing. The cleaner-looking option |
| F-style mandolin | G-D-A-E | Carved scroll on upper bout. The bluegrass standard. Gibson F-5 (1922) defined the look |
| Bowl-back / Neapolitan | G-D-A-E | Round bowl back, fluted body. The original Italian classical mandolin. Roman, Vivaldi-era repertoire |
| Electric mandolin | G-D-A-E | Solid or semi-hollow body with pickups. Rock, jazz, country crossover |
| Mandola | C-G-D-A | Alto voice — viola tuning. A fifth below the mandolin. About 17% longer scale |
| Octave mandolin | G-D-A-E (octave down) | Tenor voice — a full octave below the standard mandolin. Common in Celtic music |
| Mandocello | C-G-D-A | Bass voice — cello tuning. The mandolin family's lowest member in current use |
| Mandobass | E-A-D-G | Contrabass — double bass tuning. Rare today. Gibson made working examples 1912–1930 |
The Mexican mandriola (three strings per course instead of two) and the historical Milanese mandolin (six courses, lute tuning) survive in folk and historical-performance contexts but are not part of the mainstream working family.
The 1923 Gibson F-5 that built bluegrass
From the 1880s to the 1910s, the standard mandolin was the Italian bowl-back — round-backed, fluted, designed for Neapolitan classical playing. In 1898 the Gibson company in Kalamazoo, Michigan started building flat-backed mandolins. Those instruments were more durable, easier to mass-produce, and projected better. They sold well enough that, by 1919, Gibson hired an unusual employee: an active concert mandolinist named Lloyd Loar, and put him in charge of redesigning the entire mandolin range from scratch.
Loar took five years (1919–1924). What he produced was the F-5 mandolin: a carved spruce top, a scroll-shaped upper bout, violin-style f-holes, a longer scale length and a tone that was bigger, brighter and more cutting than any mandolin before it. Each instrument Loar approved was signed inside by hand and dated. Probably no more than 250 signed Loar F-5s were ever built between July 1922 and December 1924.
In 1945, Bill Monroe bought a used 1923 Loar F-5 — serial number 73987, signed by Loar on 9 July 1923 — at a Florida barbershop for $150. He played it for the next 50 years. The Blue Grass Boys lineup that gathered around that mandolin in 1946–48 (with Earl Scruggs on banjo, Lester Flatt on guitar, Chubby Wise on fiddle) is the lineup that defined bluegrass music. The instrument is now displayed at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.
A signed Loar F-5 in good condition now sells for upwards of $200,000. Modern Gibson F-5 reissues — and the hundreds of luthier-built F-5 copies — are essentially still trying to match what Loar did with serial 73987.
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The six who built the modern mandolin
One was the designer. One created the genre. The rest expanded it. Tap to read more.
The four things "mandolin" usually means (that aren't the instrument)
"Mandolin" gets searched more often as a kitchen tool than as an instrument. Here is what each non-musical "mandolin" actually is.
1. Kitchen mandolin — a vegetable slicer
A cooking tool: a flat slicing platform with an adjustable blade for cutting vegetables into thin, uniform slices, ribbons or julienne strips. Indispensable for potato gratin, paper-thin radish discs, sushi-grade cucumber ribbons. Got its name in the late 19th century — its flat, oblong wooden body resembled the silhouette of an A-style musical mandolin. The Japanese maker Benriner (founded 1932) is the professional-kitchen benchmark; OXO and Joyce Chen are the common home-kitchen alternatives. Cut yourself less often than you'd think; cut yourself worse when you do.
2. Mandolin Aegean Bistro — Miami restaurant
A Greek and Turkish restaurant in Miami's Design District, opened in 2009 by Anastasia Koutsioukis and Ahmet Erkaya. Indoor-outdoor seating around a whitewashed garden patio, regularly named to "best restaurants in Miami" lists. Not the instrument; not affiliated with any musical mandolin maker. The name is taken from the instrument because of its Mediterranean associations.
3. "Mandolin Rain" — Bruce Hornsby song
A 1986 single by Bruce Hornsby and the Range, from the album The Way It Is. Reached number 4 on the US Billboard Hot 100 in 1987. The song features Hornsby's piano and his brother John Hornsby's lyrics; it does not actually feature a mandolin instrument — the title is metaphorical. The track is the second-most-recognised cut from the album after the title song.
4. Mandolin Orange — the band (now Watchhouse)
A North Carolina folk duo of Andrew Marlin (mandolin) and Emily Frantz (fiddle, vocals), recording together since 2009. In May 2021 the band publicly renamed themselves Watchhouse, citing discomfort with how "Mandolin Orange" had aged as a name. Their recordings under both names sit in the modern Americana / folk revival space — Andrew Marlin does in fact play the mandolin, so this one is at least adjacent to the instrument.
Sources
- Paul Sparks, The Classical Mandolin (Clarendon Press, 1995) — the standard scholarly history of the Italian mandolin tradition and the bowl-back lineage.
- Tom Walsh and Roger H. Siminoff, The Gibson F-5 Mandolin (Hal Leonard, 2009) — full documentation of Lloyd Loar's design work at Gibson and the surviving signed F-5 instruments.
- Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville — accession records for Bill Monroe's 1923 Gibson F-5 mandolin, serial 73987.
- Robert Cantwell, Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound (University of Illinois Press, 1984) — the social and musical history of the 1946–48 Blue Grass Boys lineup.
- Gibson Brands corporate archives, Kalamazoo — original F-5 specifications and production records 1922–1924.
- International Bluegrass Music Association — official records of Mandolin Player of the Year awards (1990–present).
- The MacArthur Foundation — Chris Thile fellowship citation (2012).
- Bruce Hornsby and the Range, The Way It Is (RCA Records, 1986) — primary recording credits.
Continue exploring
Eight strings, four courses, one Loar signature inside the body. The mandolin is still a violin you pluck.