My wife found a great deal on a Trinity College TM-275 Celtic Mandola. I believe the flat top, flat back, a oval tone hole are what make it Celtic. This Mandola has a 17-inch scale (the distance from bridge to nut), and I tune it to GDAD (G2-D4), just like my Bouzouki.

When I list out numbers here, those are gauges. Near as I can tell, they’re the string diameter in mils (thousandths of an inch).

My Current Favorite Strings

D’Addario sells single phosphor wound strings, and I use 20-32-42-56. This winds up putting between 22 and 25 pounds of force on each string, for a total of around 180-200.

They came as brass-colored ball ends, and I needed loop ends. I used big pliers to crush the ball ends, and it’s easy enough to remove the fragments. I see now I could have just bought loop end singles. Oops!

These strings sound pretty good! I wish I could get unwound 20s from D’Addario, so I might replace those with 20s I get somewhere else.

Prior Attempt 1: D’Addario Mandola Strings

15-25-35-52. These are made to be tuned CGDA, and sound lovely in that tuning. You can tune them down to GDAD (or GDAE) in a pinch: other than buzzing a bit, they’re okay.

Prior Attempt 2: StringJoy Nickel Wound

I previously tried a custom Nickel Wound set from StringJoy: 19-30-46-64. The StringJoy Nickel Wound strings give me string tensions of 22.7, 20.8, 25.9, 24.0 pounds, for a total neck tension of 184.8 pounds. I should have gone with 34 on the third course, for a tension of 26.7.

The Nickel Wound strings were notably “dull”, meaning they didn’t have many high overtones. I guess this means they were damping high frequency oscillations. Weird. They didn’t last long.