ShortScale.org

anyone done this? What strings you use? Can you do it and make the guitar comfortable to play?

I realized I have all the parts for a tele laying around (cheap parts), so I figured, maybe I use it on dem baritonez.

Aen does/did it with GHS 11-70 string sets, which used to be the Zakk Wylde sig set but are now just a set of Boomers you can get I think.

paul_ wrote:Aen does/did it with GHS 11-70 string sets, which used to be the Zakk Wylde sig set but are now just a set of Boomers you can get I think.

Hmm. What tuning does he use? I've got two 25.5" guitars I can do that to.

mkt3000 wrote:

paul_ wrote:Aen does/did it with GHS 11-70 string sets, which used to be the Zakk Wylde sig set but are now just a set of Boomers you can get I think.

Hmm. What tuning does he use? I've got two 25.5" guitars I can do that to.

you'll probably have to do truss rod and saddle adjustments . . . but I'm thinking of something a little heavier than that but if that will work, I guess there's not too much reason to go bigger.

mkt3000 wrote:

paul_ wrote:Aen does/did it with GHS 11-70 string sets, which used to be the Zakk Wylde sig set but are now just a set of Boomers you can get I think.

Hmm. What tuning does he use? I've got two 25.5" guitars I can do that to.

A to B.
(A E A EE B)
or, A E A E

Yup, I have an old Jackson that I had tuned down to B. Just used D'Addario medium top/heavy bottoms (11-62). It did have a Floyd Rose bridge though, so not sure how that would work on a Tele.

I mean, don't people in doom metal tune their Les Pauls to drop A and the like? What's to keep anyone from just getting really heavy strings for a Strat or Tele?

I've been wanting to do this to my RG for a while. Maybe I'd actually play the darn thing. Had it tuned to C standard at one point, actually sounded somewhat decent.

Most people playing in A, B and C tuning, for some reason, don't play baritones... they almost all play downtuned standard guitars. AS mentioned, you'll need to adjust the set up for the heavier strings and looser set up, but it's frequently done.

Ankhanu wrote:Most people playing in A, B and C tuning, for some reason, don't play baritones... they almost all play downtuned standard guitars. AS mentioned, you'll need to adjust the set up for the heavier strings and looser set up, but it's frequently done.

Beats getting used to yet another scale length that's for sure.

frettedlefty wrote:

Ankhanu wrote:Most people playing in A, B and C tuning, for some reason, don't play baritones... they almost all play downtuned standard guitars. AS mentioned, you'll need to adjust the set up for the heavier strings and looser set up, but it's frequently done.

Beats getting used to yet another scale length that's for sure.

Beats playing on the instrument for an hour or two??
I'm a pretty shyte musician, but, I can readily switch between scale lengths. Yes, when you first pick up the instrument scale, it feels a little unusual... but your fingers figure out where they need to go pretty quickly. 34", 30", 28.5", 25.5", 24", it doesn't take much to get used to them.

Good for you bud. You're talking like I've never played a baritone.

I'm talking like it was a silly premise.

I have a hard time switching scales. After I've played awhile on a neck, as long as it is vastly different from my other guitars, it's fine. But when I have two guitars with similar specs and shape but different scale lengths, my brain does not compute.

A-standard is easily acheivable on any old guitar. Don't let the detractors lead you to thinking you need any special guitar or scale length to do it because you don't. I have a 30" scale baritone tuned to A and a regular old 25.5" guitar tuned to A. The sound and feel is completely different. You can play the same things on either, but it's simply going to sound more like a bass on the baritone, more like a guitar on the guitar.

I used a D'addario light 8-string set for the guitar because I couldn't find the Zakk 11-70 strings anywhere. The lowest string is a 65 I believe. I used the lowest three strings for the E-D and then skipped to the wound 24 for the G and the 16 and 11 for the B and high E respectively. It's an odd one because tuned to E I'll normally be using a 10 anyway, but it works great. The crazy thing is only minimal truss rod adjustment was necessary; with the tension you're going to have from those big strings you'll be creating as much pull on the neck as you would with a medium/heavy bottom set tuned to E.

Basically, try it. It's easy.

FFFFFUUUUUUUU-

Ankhanu wrote:Most people playing in A, B and C tuning, for some reason, don't play baritones... they almost all play downtuned standard guitars. AS mentioned, you'll need to adjust the set up for the heavier strings and looser set up, but it's frequently done.

I think there are some solid reasons for playing a standard scale. First of all, longer scale guitars aren't that easy to find. Second of all, they often have a pretty tight sound and people tend to want their low tuned guitars to sound pretty loose. I mean, can you imagine playing doom metal on 30" scale? You'd get tight spaghetti western sounds instead of dark and terrible. Even when you put distortion on it, you'd still retain the basic character of the longer and tighter scale. Even a 27" sounds quite bright, really. Almost too much, so. To cancel that out you can use heavier strings that sound darker but at some point, you affect the instrument's ability to have six playable strings in there... so there is a bit of a limit to the gauges you can use, and then you have a bunch of heavy strings that are hard to bend and you have a longer neck, too. What's the point, really, when a 24.75" scale will handle drop A just fine with the right strings?

I think with the music that people tend to want low tuned guitars for, usually brooding and dark is what people want. A longer scale is detrimental to that. That said, if you want to play clean, a longer scale does tighten up the strings for you so that it doesn't feel so much like spaghetti down there. Otherwise, sometimes with low enough tuning, everything sounds out of tune... not always in a bad way, though.

I guess I'm a little confused, is baritone considered low A? I was only looking to go down to B. Either way, I may just try 13s and rock out. I usually play 11, so I like tighter heavier strings and this guitar won't be for playing traditional doom metal or anything like that, I just like the range of the baritonez.

Yes a and b are both considered baritone.

Yeah. I think B is kinda the standard, but A is not uncommon at all.

Also, Honeyiscool, that's a pretty solid point regarding the looseness of sound between the scales.