Going Electric

I have wanted an electric mandolin for years, and I think one may be somewhere in my future.  Shortly after buying my current axe of choice, the Vessel F-5, I announced that this was No. 2 of perhaps ten or so.  No. 3 was destined to be either a Bussman Old Wave C# style or some obscure electric.

If you even bothered to read this far, you might ask yourself what an electric mandolin sounds like.  Thanks to YouTube and the Stoneman Family, I found the best mandolin video of all time.  Seriously.

How'd ya like that, daddy?

Now playing the mandolin is great stuff, but this Stoneman chick takes it to a whole new level.  She makes it look like the kind of thing governments either outlaw or highly regulate, and churches decry as outright sin.  If she would have stopped hopping around, I might have been able to find out more about her mandolin.  It is definitely an electric/acoustic, and appears to be a modified Gibson similar to Ole' Hoss, Sam Bush's 1937 Gibson F-5.  I would laugh for a week if it turned out to be the same mandolin, but it isn't.

Knowing very little about guitars in general, and next to nothing about electric guitars has made my electric mandolin search very challenging.  It is not as if one can drop by the local guitar shop and play a handful of samples.  I have only personally seen and played one; a "Tinycaster" made by Gary Vessel.  The following video represents what I am after a little more closely.  Much thanks to SkiBumK27 for posting.

This is no The Lemon Song solo, but we're not talking guitars here either.  This actually makes pretty basic open chord forms sound a lot cooler than they usually do.

In the end, I imagine I will wind up with a solid body model, partly because they seem to be a bit less expensive.  Besides, I will buy it so I can plug it in and make it scream.  My F-5 is more than adequate for my acoustic needs right now.