Gold tone mandocello review and demo 

6:30 That's a pretty epic Jazz Tone.

Excellent demo, great that you played different sounds via pickups and mic.

4:05 It's a floating pickup so the top is free to vibrate. Eastman makes Archtop Acoustic-Electric Guitars w/ this feature too.

The mandocello & the baritone guitar make a good duo.

Actually a Floating Humbucker doesn't look out of place because this is pretty common w/ Archtop Guitars.

nice playing.

Nice strumming.

With 2 Pickups, you have even more versatility.

Very cool instrument! I have a suspicion that the pickup issues in the mandolin family have less to do with the pickups themselves, and more so are a result of brass wound strings. It looks like all of its courses are wound. When I've used brass wound or monel wound strings on my electric instruments when I have steel wound on them at the same time(experiments, they can't be stopped) I end up with that same dull inarticulate resonance that the humbucker only setting gave here in your demonstration. My gut is telling me that flatwounds would bring out the vibrancy in the humbucker, but one'd lose some acoustic richness. And probably have to use a flatwound "bass" string to have the girth needed for C strings. I suspect a typical roundwound electric string would have too small of a core to wrap ratio, and thus give off harmonics that sound more like an "electric guitar" than a mandocello or mandolin, if used on one of those. Also, I've been subscribed to your channel for a while, and was just now like, "Dekalb, IL. . . Ax in Hand!" I live just down the road in Rochelle, IL, and got some cables and strings from there not long ago. Side note, that ancient beat up lute that was there, in the bass room at the time, is just so awesome. What a relic! Anyways, it's great to see a mandocello being appreciated!

It's modeled after a Gibson Archtop Electric Guitar

So, I play a four-string guitar tuned to open G (GDGB) with a lot of slide, I started way back on an 8-string ukulele and loved the sound of the double string courses. Of course I’m wondering how feasible it would be to use different strings on this and tune it to open G. Any thoughts on that?

Thomastik makes Precision Flatwound strings you can use on this to save the frets from scratches. The pickup makes recording easer.

I bought one of the very first ones produced by Gold Tone (they had gold hardware, not chrome). It needed new steel strings (the bronze were wretched), a new bone nut (instead of that crap half bone/fret thing), and a complete setup from the word go. It had NO acoustic volume, which sucked. They sold it as an acoustic instrument, and it wasn't. It was electric, period. The piezo unit sounded harsh, without fullness. The neck pickup was fine, but it really needed to be paired with something trebly and sweet. I spent over $150 improving it on top of buying the darn thing, and I was very disappointed. I could not deal with the narrowness of the string spacing and sold it 3 weeks later.

I would love to hear some bluegrass on that thing!

I like it acoustically but the pups are not good at all.

Transducer sounds horrid…..clickity clackity….. interesting instrument….i dont know about dropping 1200 on it.