My wife is into folk music and plays the guitar. She has recently decided that she would also like to learn to play a mandola or bouzouki but doesn’t know which instrument would be best to compliment the style of music she plays. It is mainly british folk but not neccessarly Irish.
Hi and welcome!
The best advice I can think of would be for her to listen to as many recordings of both instruments as possible. They are similar to play (although with different tuning schemes), but have remarkably different voices. Both show up in all manner of folk music, so it’s more an issue of deciding on the sound that pleases the player. There are (or can be) differences in scale length that she might find important. The mandola is usually a shorter instrument. Of course, a great many players end up with a full arsenal of instruments for various purposes.
The question comes down to what she wants to do with it. Melody players tend to opt for shorter scale lengths*, which usually means mandola (European nomenclature) or octave mandolin (US). Accompanists who intend to bash out chords find the longer scale irish bouzouki more useful. The line 'twixt the twain might be around 22 or 24 inches.
Tunings and number of courses (pairs of strings; usually either four or five) also matter, but scale length is the major issue.
*the sounding length of the strings, ie the distance between the nut and bridge.
Thanks for the replies, they have helped and your quite right about having many different instruments , what ever she gets i think the other one will soon follw 