Harvey Reid of Woodpecker Records is an amazing musician, multi-instrumentalist, music technologist, inventor, classic troubadour and a walking library of music history. One of my favorite stories I heard from Harvey had to do with a performance he was playing at somewhere out West many years ago, when a mean-looking guy came up to him after a song and asked menacingly, “You know any songs about killin’?”. Harvey, the consummate professional, answered “Why yes, as a matter of fact I do”, and went on to finish the set singing from memory nothing but various old songs about “killin’ ”, one after another. Now, that is a class act.

In 1981 Harvey won the National Fingerpicking Guitar Competition, and the next year the International Autoharp Competition. To balance the excruciatingly beautiful treble highs of the Autoharp, Harvey also is a black-belt with the Mandocello, pictured here. The Mandocello is an 8-string instrument that mixes the aural shimmer of double strings with the sweet droning growl of thick strings tuned low in fifths, and it has a typical scale length just a bit shorter than the guitar.

Harvey was one of the first to tour with the Chrysalis guitar starting in 1981. He toured internationally, and found that with the Chrysalis, he could carry two guitars as easily as one. At one point, Harvey asked me if there was any way there could be Chrysalis Mandocello. And I answered why yes, of course, and subsequently added to his Chrysalis travel kit a re-purposed Chrysalis bridge drilled for the Mandocello’s eight strings, a matching modified 8-string headstock, and a regular Chrysalis neck with the nut cut for eight big strings. Using the two kits with the same two-piece Chrysalis body, Harvey could put together an up-to-pitch Mandocello as easily and quickly as he could a guitar. He once told me that at one performance, he had actually disassembled his instrument on stage, switched the Mandocello and guitar parts, and then re-assembled the new instrument to pitch between songs. I smiled on hearing that.

While the Chrysalis guitar had been designed for six regular strings, the much heavier strings of the Mandocello have to be tuned up to the slightly longer scale of the Chrysalis neck – 648mm (25.5”) – creating a total string tension on the order of a 12-string guitar, which was more than the Chrysalis body frames and grills had been designed for. As luck would have it, the Chrysalis’s carbon-fiber construction came through with flying colors. You could see the frames and grills strain under the additional tension, but everything was stable, and remains so to this day. In the original picture for the one above, there is an ugly little tension crack in the frame, which I shopped out here for appearances sake. I have the original if anyone wants to see it.

To make guitar notes sound sweet when played all the way up the neck, the nominal scale length has an “intonation” factor added to it that is typically about 4mm on the low E string, and about 2mm on the high E string. This is why the bone saddle on the bridge of steel string guitars normally looks crooked. I had no idea what intonation would be required for those long-scale Mandocello strings, but I figured all that tension would squeeze the guitar shorter by some unknown amount, so for intonation I started with the normal guitar intonation of 2mm-4mm, then added another 5mm for good measure. The Gods were smiling that day, because this intuition-driven gross correction turned out to be perfect. Harvey was amazed he could play chords way up the neck that his other “dedicated” mandocello couldn’t touch.

And it still does so to this day.