If you're one of those people who have asked me questions like what is that instrument you're playing and how are you tuning it, this should provide some, all, or perhaps more of an explanation than you may have been looking for. Included within are playlists that provide lots of examples of some of the things I'm talking about here. The last playlist is a very new one!I was raised by classical musicians. When I was nine years old, they asked me what instrument I wanted to play. (I don't think "none" was one of the available options, not that I'm complaining.) A friend of the family, a colleague of my parents, was a cellist from Vermont named David Wells, who I always figured I might have been named after, though my parents said they just liked the name. David was also a phenomenal cellist, and I regularly got to hear him playing his magnificent instrument up close. I'm pretty sure if my parents had been working with a violinist who played like that, I would have been drawn to the violin instead, or any number of other instruments, but I picked the cello, because I liked it, and it wasn't a piano, which my parents both played. It seemed safer that way.
As a teenager I eventually drifted away from taking cello lessons and playing the cello at all, as I gradually discovered different folk musical traditions from around the world, as well as psychedelic rock music. I took up the electric bass guitar, and then the acoustic guitar, and eventually got into writing songs and playing the guitar a whole lot.
I played the guitar in a serious way for almost two decades before I ever started experimenting with alternative tunings, which I ultimately got into to such an extent that I rarely used standard tuning anymore after some years. More than a decade into my obsession with the DADGAD guitar tuning (also after more than a decade of touring regularly with Attila the Stockbroker, who sings and plays mandola), I rediscovered the cello. Which -- I'll explain -- led me to a fairly deep exploration of related stringed instruments that you play with a pick, such as mandolin, mandola, mandocello, and, especially, the Irish bouzouki. Then NS Designs came out with a fretted version of their gorgeous electric cellos, and I re-rediscovered the cello.
The rest of this piece will basically be an unpacking of that last paragraph.
There is a deep conformist tendency, a tendency to want to do things the way other people do things, that has merits, but also can hold us back in a big way. When I think back to why it took me so long to ever start playing with alternative guitar tunings, I think of that. Especially knowing that I'm far from alone in this. Some of the best guitarists I know today have been playing for longer than I have, but have still never gotten into alternative tunings. Among players of bowed instruments, I struggle to think of anyone I know who has ever bothered changing the tuning of their instrument and seeing what they might do with that.
I could dwell for a long time on what it is that so often holds us back from really experimenting musically. If you're part of the industry, some kind of professional, you may have the need or desire to stick to a particular genre, which prohibits too much drifting musically in other directions. But more often it's a matter of built-in conformity of various kinds, and I would encourage people to reject this programming, and embrace playfulness and experimentation. Not just because it's fun to do so, but because you might find it works much better than you thought it would.
I was a regular listener of Irish and Scottish guitarists who got such great sounds out of playing in DADGAD, such as Dick Gaughan, for many years before I ever changed my guitar's tuning. I had some strange notion about mastering standard tuning first, this idea that anything they could do in DADGAD could somehow or other be done in standard tuning, if you worked at it hard enough. Looking back at this mentality, it's like someone wanting to become a master tennis player using a badminton racket. Maybe it's possible, but why not just use a tennis racket instead? It's not cheating.
It's a funny thing how a tradition, once established, can become doctrinaire. Taking the long view, instruments and musical styles are constantly evolving and cross-pollinating in so many ways. But once there's a standardized way of making, playing, or tuning an instrument, it's the way to do it, and anything else is suspect. Same with musical styles. Every good bluegrass mandolin player knows how to avoid open strings at every turn. It's both part of the doctrine, and it's how you get that sound. But what if you want to try a different sound? You can approximate the sound of an open string, or you can just play an open string...! You can approximate the sound of an open tuning, or you can just change the tuning.
My first rediscovery of the cello began around 2016. Cellos had long been a thing around Portland, with various cello ensembles around town. My daughter Leila introduced me to a video of two cellists doing wild stuff together, which is what made me think, all of a sudden, about the possibilities for the cello as an instrument on which you can play some semblance of chords, while singing with it, as you would with a guitar, bouzouki, banjo, etc.
If you're into Appalachian music, like me, then the idea of someone playing a fiddle and singing is not unfamiliar. There is a guy named Joe Kessler (who is playing on my album, We Just Want the World from 1997) who used to play that style of Appalachian fiddle on the streets of Harvard Square when I was a full-time busker around there. Playing rhythmic chords and riffs on the fiddle and singing at the same time is also a thing in other old-time traditions -- Cajun, Cape Breton, etc.
If you could do this to great effect with the fiddle, I thought, then about what the cello?
The cello is much more like the range of a guitar than the fiddle is. Which is also much more like the range of a human voice. Which is one of the reasons why the guitar is such a popular instrument for accompanying the human voice. You're basically harmonizing with your voice, at slightly below the range you're typically singing in.
The first big obstacle I encountered trying to play fiddle-type chording on the cello is the volume of the acoustic cello, and the physical effort involved with holding down two notes at the same time. Even if you use a mute, the acoustic cello is designed to be loud, and it is a loud instrument, if you play it with a bow. If you bow two notes at the same time it tends to become even louder, assuming you want that full sound you only get when you dig in with the bow. Also, to sustain a chord with two notes, especially lower ones, doesn't require as much physical effort as with a double bass, but it requires effort, and whether one wants to admit it or not, it's too tiring to keep it up for that long.
One solution to the problem of volume is to amplify your voice, to shout, or to sing opera. Another is to use an electric cello, allowing you to play as quietly as you want to. Turns out it's not the action of bowing the strings that produces the noise, it's the reverberating chamber. With an electric cello you can completely control that. And, as with an electric guitar, you can get a great sound with less pressure and lower action. Or at least that's the case with the NS Designs series of electric cellos that I'm familiar with.
Using an NS Designs electric cello this way, the accomplishments I'm especially proud of are a couple tracks on my 2017 album, Punk Baroque, "Just A Renter" and "Gather Round" (both of which were later adapted for use in the 2022 album, Take the Power Back, with Mic Crenshaw). I wrote those songs and other songs on the cello, so they work especially well with cello accompaniment. With some other songs I wrote, I found ways to do a cello accompaniment that sounded pretty good.
I largely abandoned the effort, however, after eventually coming to the conclusion that I just couldn't consistently play chords in tune over the course of a set. Not only is it much harder to consistently have perfect intonation when sustaining two notes at the same time, bowed, on a cello, electric or not, but with the added distractions of singing into a mic and maybe having lots of extraneous noises happening around me in a room I might be performing in, I found I was slipping out of tune too often for this to really work, back then.
In 2020 I began the dive into the mando family of instruments in earnest. It later comes together with the cello explorations, but it began as an independent obsession, initially derived from what had become a longstanding fascination with the fresh and captivating sound I found in playing the guitar in DADGAD, capoed on the 7th fret.
There are so many reasons to love DADGAD, but one of them is simply that it is not standard tuning, and it therefore sounds fresh, compared to most of what's ever been recorded with a guitar. By the same token, capoing your instrument high up is different from so much of what's been recorded, which is without a capo. So this also produces a sound that seems a bit new. In combination, more so.
After a very long time of leaving a capo on the 7th fret of my guitar, sometimes without moving it for weeks, if I was just playing music in my living room, I eventually realized that if I liked the sound of a mandola that much, I should just get one. Which isn't exactly true, but more than a bit, anyway. If you capo the guitar on the 9th fret, that's more like the sound of a mandola.
In any case, I got way into playing the mandola, but from the outset I had no intention of tuning it in fifths, like you'd normally do with violins, violas, and cellos, along with mandolins, mandolas, and mandocellos. I tuned it in a sort of mandola equivalent of DADGAD -- CGCF.
Below is a playlist of songs I wrote with the mandola since 2021 or so.
Mandola Playlist
Getting into the mandola eventually led me towards playing bigger versions of this type of instrument, ultimately ending up touring a lot with an Irish bouzouki as my main instrument. What's a bit funny about that is how much it is like a guitar. Not that I was trying to get away from the guitar, necessarily. But the bouzouki is closer to the range of the human voice than the mandola is, and you just have more flexibility to play in different keys, especially if you're mainly wanting to play in open tunings.
Open tunings, it should be said in no uncertain terms, only lend themselves to playing in specific keys. This is true of any tuning, including standard tuning for guitar, but it's much more true of open tunings. This is not something to overcome, it is something to accept, and even embrace.
What has kept me very much on board with the fascination with not only the bouzouki but the mandola and mandocello as well is what you can do with a two-note chord. The clangy nature of these instruments, reminiscent of an electric guitar, in that clangy way evocative of other, older instruments, more than the deeply resonant (and beautiful) guitar is. So many forms of beauty! But clangy is most definitely one of them. At least those of us who love bouzoukis and banjos would agree...
With the bigger stretches involved with fingering chords on the bouzouki, compared with smaller instruments in the mando family, playing in open tunings is more common. The one I use is less common, and is just an adaptation of DADGAD on the bouzouki -- GDGC.
Here's a professionally-filmed concert I did with my new, London-made Paul Hathaway bouzouki in October.
Bouzouki Playlist
No one that I know of tunes a mandocello this way, but I do, and it works great. I tune it CGCF. Traveling with one instrument is far easier than taking more than one, especially if you're flying. But if you're not playing in highly versatile tunings, like a guitar in standard tuning, a great way to play in different keys is to use different instruments, like a bouzouki if you're somewhere around the key of G and a mandocello or mandola if you're around the key of C. Even if you're using the same sort of open tuning on all of these instruments, the difference in sound between each one is tremendous, and that and other factors naturally mean that each instrument lends itself to different sorts of approaches to playing that will bring out different aspects of whatever music you're playing or creating.
Using the bouzouki and mandocello like this, I found I was often thinking about my largely failed experiments with cello-and-voice from years earlier, a lot. It occurred to me that tuning the cello like I was tuning the mandocello could help a lot with the problems I was having with holding down some of the chords I was playing with the cello tuned in fifths. Tuned CGCF, the intervals between the strings aren't all the same, and this gives me more options for playing cool-sounding chords that don't involve the use of as many fingers at the same time, holding things down.
Until 2022, I had never even considered tuning the cello differently, although I had been playing with different tunings on other instruments for many years. Retuning the cello opened up all kinds of new possibilities for playing cool chords and using it to accompany my voice. I still ran into the same problems with keeping consistent intonation while attempting to do the things I wanted to do with it, though.
I fantasized about a fretted version of the cello I was playing, what a perfect solution to all my problems that would be. One day, a few months ago, I searched online to see if someone made such an instrument, only to find that NS Designs, maker of my electric cello, had just started selling a fretted electric cello! Eventually I got one for myself (deep thanks to all you CSA members making my extravagant musical experimentations possible!), and it has been exactly what I was looking for.
There are many two-note chord formations where it's very helpful to have the flexibility allowed by frets to position your fingers not quite exactly where they would need to be for perfect intonation on a fretless cello. I don't deny that for a better cellist than I it might be possible to do much more interesting things than what I'm doing, with or without frets. And you can still hit a note in the wrong place, use too much pressure, bend the string, or otherwise play out of tune on a fretted cello. But just as open tunings and capos introduce all kinds of new possibilities, frets do, too, without question.
Here's a bunch of songs I adapted for my new fretted electric cello, which is tuned CGCFG.
Fretted Cello Playlist
So, in a nutshell, that's how I got into open tunings, cellos fretted and unfretted, mandolas and bouzoukis. If anybody wants to form a string quartet, that's what I'd like to do next.
