baritone guitars for non-doom usage?

[dubkitty]

this is one of the things i love about this place…i come up with an odd idea and someone who knows more than me offers an answer that hits the spot.

[dubkitty]

it strikes me that the G&L circuit would be particularly great in a serious jazz archtop or a super-clean platform like my idea of a Hohner Steinberger with Bartolinis in.

[dubkitty]

i specced out a neck on the Musikraft site. i don’t need a lot of the options they offer so it came out to $329, which is less than a new Fender neck. big CBS headstock, maple with dark Indian rosewood board, pearloid dot markets/larger white side dots, finished in lacquer sealer. the things i need to figure out are tuner hole size, fingerboard radius, fret size/composition, nut width, heel width, and back profile. i’m assuming a flatter board would be better for bending those huge strings. to make life easier i’ll use the nut/heel width of the standard neck. i don’t know what to do about neck profile and will have to get everything out to play and see what feels best…my temptation is for a skinnier neck but how would that handle bari string tension? i also have no clue about fret sizing, but have to think higher and more jumbo would be better for those heavy strings. i also still have to find good tuners which will dictate the drill holes in the headstock.

assuming this goes, which likely won’t happen for a little while due to funding constraints, my current plan is to finish the neck with the brush-on clear poly. it worked very well on the Kondor repairs. i’m slightly tempted to try to paint the face of the headstock Candy Apple Red but again that’s well beyond my level of spray-can competence.

i’ll no doubt be asking more specific questions about the areas i’m still working out once i have a better idea of what i’m doing.

[Zork]

Don't worry about tension. The D'addario EXL158 baritone set in B Standard on 28" scale has about the same tension as a regular D'addario EXL115 set (.011 - 0.49) in E Standard on 25.5" scale:



https://rodrigocfd.github.io/string-tension-calc/

[Zork]

Funny enough, the Ernie Ball Slinky Baritone set in B Standard looks okay on standard scale but is reeeally heavy on baritone scale:



I wonder if they designed the set with standard scale in mind?

[Blackened Soul]

Well…. I’m not going to not say that is the set I use on all my gibson scale guitars tuned to bstandard or something.. wish the g was heavier though… back when I started using that tuning this crazy county guy with a shop in Berkeley called guitarorama set up my first one when I was 17 and the g was a .029 plain.. thing tore your hands up but what a sound.. particularly for slide..

[dubkitty]

i had to go back and look to see that the CVJM strings are now .012/.017/.024W/.034/.046/.056 which isn't too far off from the D'Addario .013 set other than the low B string...kind of the acoustic lights version if that set is acoustic mediums. seriously, back in the day a typical acoustic medium-gauge set was exactly the same as the D'A .013 set except that the low E was .056. which is to say that i can probably deal with it. i should consider your set if it's going to drag out for awhile before i have the stuff for building a baritone, which it almost certainly is...the set on there now is playable but certainly not ideal. realistically it'll be a couple of months at least before i can order the neck.

[Blackened Soul]

Keep in mind is use 12s for e standard..
but here is a Gibson scale with the Ernie ball baritone set tuned to b standard, you can drop to a with ok intonation

Guitar is a precision guitar kits 58 v with Duncan black winter pickups through a orange thunderverb200 and 1967 sunn 1x15

Here is a clean one.. well ambient with tons of verb and echo.., two tracks, epiphone Sheraton 2 with a bigsby and black winter pickups

[dubkitty]

the second example is more like the way i'll probably approach it. i'm not hearing myself doing a lot of string-bending other than shoegaze WOOOOOOOs i'd do with the Jazzmaster tremolo. at this point in my life i'm trying to get away from blues licks. there are certain blues rudiments l can't stand to hear any more than the bluegrass roll-over-a-G-chord thing. i'm kind of thinking of it like a piano rather than a guitar or bass because it doesn't really lend itself to my rock and roll shit.

[Blackened Soul]

The longer scale will lend to that, giving more pronounced overtones and harmonics

[dubkitty]

the guy in DIIV (center) sometimes reminds me of a pianist's left hand.

[dubkitty]

after the track there's a example of the brutal parodies of New Age claptrap that are shot through their current show as back-projected video before the show/encore and between songs. i wish they'd tour again...i saw them last year in Richmond and enjoyed it so much that i went to see them again in Philadelphia a few days later.

the more i think about it, the more i want to do something cool with the fingerboard inlays, blocks or stars both of which Musikraft offers. i don't want to pay an extra $110 though LOL.

i found some baritone-specific locking tuners with 10mm posts. the first-4th string pegs accept up to a .056, and the 6th an astonishing .096. so that's settled.

https://sporthitech.com/products/genuin ... set-chrome

given the tension figures you've provided, i feel OK going with their skinniest C profile which is .79" at the nut and 89" at the 12th fret. probably 12" or 14" radius...if 12" is Les Paul radius that might be a bit too curved for bending heavy strings, but i think 16" or 20" would seem too flat. on the other hand, the Hopf fingerboard is as flat as Kansas and it's extremely comfortable. big fat neck too.

[dubkitty]

i really appreciate you going to all this effort finding information for me about this stuff. it's really helping a lot.

[Zork]

Uh, the tuners are cool. I hate to drill out tuners for fat strings. I did this twice already. It's not difficult but nonetheless nerve-wrecking...
For the fretboard radius: What kind of bridge do you have? Keep in mind that you want a fretboard radius matching your bridge! The Squier Bass VI is 9.5" radius and it's totally fine by the way.

[Zork]

the guy in DIIV (center) sometimes reminds me of a pianist's left hand.

This is the most 90's thing I've seen since the 90's!