Catch of the Day: 1924 Gibson H-5

1924 Gibson H-5

This is the third time I’ve turned to a Lloyd Loar instrument for a Catch of the Day, but I think most instrument geeks would agree that if anyone deserved the extra attention, he does. To read more about Lloyd Loar you can check out the entries on the 1924 Gibson L-5 and the circa 1935 Vivi-Tone but if you just want to hear what all the fuss is about, you can listen to John Reischman playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on his 1924 Loar-designed Gibson F-5.

Most people who know the name Lloyd Loar associate it with the Gibson F-5 mandolin he helped design. Few people know that he also worked on three other instruments for Gibson in the Master Series, the L-5 guitar, the K-5 mandocello and, today’s Catch, the H-5 mandola. The H-5, or, to give its full name, The Master Mandola H-5 Professional Special didn’t sell very well during its brief run in the Gibson catalog and today it is believed that only 19 examples exist, making this a very rare bird indeed. The poor market performance of the H-5 wasn’t because it didn’t sound good–I’ve been lucky enough to have played two of them over the years and they sound amazing– it’s just that by the time Gibson hired Loar to help redesign their mandolin family to boost flagging sales, everybody wanted banjos, ukuleles and guitars instead.

Personally, I’ve always loved the sound of mandolas. They are tuned a fifth down from the mandolin, to CGDA, which gives them such a lovely warm, throaty tone I’m surprised more people don’t play them. This very clean H-5 weighs in at $105,000, which is a lot of money but then again, it seems a bit more reasonable when you consider that there are only 18 other guys in the world that have one. If you’d like to join that rarified club, just apply to the folks at Carter Vintage Guitars for membership. (Scroll to the bottom of the page for a video clip of Sterling Abernathy playing this mandola.)