NTGD: Recording King Dirty 37 000 Tenor

[paul_]

Whitewood back & sides (and probably bracing) with spruce top, 23� scale mahogany neck, ovangkol fingerboard (and probably bridge), bone saddle and nut.

Impressive for the money ($170); the 000‘s internal bracing is accurate (compared to my 2001 MIA Martin 00-15). I wish the neck was as well made as the body, but being a 4-string banjo neck it totally robs me of the ability to assess it as an acoustic guitar neck. It sure does work. The tuners are not very precise/positive when turning and it makes tuning up annoying.

Thankfully got a good one with nice action and a low saddle... these things defy their pricepoint soundwise but they are a page from that Jim Dandy book so it’s commonly-enough alleged that you can get a lemon if you’re unlucky. The cheapest feeling aspect are the very unsmooth fret surfaces but I don’t foresee doing a lot of wide bends on a 4-string acoustic. The not-notched-at-least-on-purpose saddle also has a couple of different burred in locations for the top two strings so they can currently shift around a bit and the b string settles a little too far away from the g string at the bridge (I will probably carefully address this with my fret files if stepping up the string gauges doesn’t alleviate it a bit) and the nut is slightly off centre (mainly noticeable by the first fret outer string locations and 3rd fret marker looking off), I’m not going to bother messing with that unless I ever replace the nut for some reason.

Only tried DGBE so far (and capo’d at the 5th fret to transplant my ukulele repertoire of covers), when I change the strings I’ll cannibalize a heavy phosphor bronze 6-string set to get something agreeable with different open/banjo/5ths tunings. RK Tenors come with D’Addario Tenor sets and I think they only come in 10/14/22w/32w, so I’ve got all the acoustic strings in the house out to get something sorted. I imagine the true learning curve begins then as so far I’m only treating it like a baritone uke or guitar.

I have already christened it by ceremoniously biffing it off the frame of the back door while I was coming in from a smoke, then used a sharpie to touch up the scuff I made through the black paint and into the whitewood. Eh, it’ll be fine.

[izodiak]

Never played these types of guitars...
Looks nice..
The tenor makes it bass-like ?

I love the sound of acoustic bases all I can say

[plopswagon]

Tenors are typically tuned higher than a bass. They were made for banjo players to transition to guitar when banjos fell out of vogue in jazz orchestras.

[paul_]

What plops said, it’s a tenor banjo neck on a guitar body. I have mine tuned to DGBE right now so it’s just the top 4 strings of a guitar and I’m playing all the stuff I was playing on ukulele with it. A baritone ukulele is a similar instrument, albeit nylon-strung (and rarely internally braced to handle steel strings) and some people play tenor ukes with a low G string instead of the soprano/concert/tenor ukuleles’ usual high G providing reentrant intervals, which would be like using a capo on the 5th fret of a Chicago-tuned tenor guitar. Tenor guitars are also often tuned CGDA like a mandola or viola, or DGAD (the top four strings of DADGAD) which is a common Celtic folk tuning.

Also given the scale (23�) and dimensions (fingerboard is about 1.25� wide at its widest), it’d make a pathetic bass.

I’m going to try to make a video of this at some point, especially when I restring it and try other tunings. It is a lot of fun, almost all I’ve played the past month.

[Noirie.]

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