Bariton Tuning?

taylorboy · Post by **taylorboy** » Sat Mar 27, 2004 12:20 pm

Can you tune a standard dreadnought to a baritone tuning (I play a Taylor 410CE)? I realize this might be a strange question; however, I can't find an answer anywhere else!

Also...is there any technical advice in starting to try this tuning?

Thanks,

Chris

Matty Boom · Post by **Matty Boom** » Sat Mar 27, 2004 12:30 pm

no

it's standard tuning just down 3 and a half steps i believe

so you can play the songs in standard (or down a whole or half step or whatever) but it's just going to be in a different key

DMBFan63 · Post by **DMBFan63** » Sat Mar 27, 2004 1:23 pm

technically you could play it on a dreadnought, but it'd basically be like playing without tightening the strings at all when you put them through the tuning heads

grock · Post by **grock** » Mon Mar 29, 2004 12:57 am

DMBFan63 wrote:technically you could play it on a dreadnought, but it'd basically be like playing without tightening the strings at all when you put them through the tuning heads

it's not that bad. there's a number of songs out there in drop B tuning where you drop the low E all the way down to B (better use medium guage for this. but to drop all the strings that much is rediculous. the intonation will be all wrong. buy an polyphonic octave doubler. then you can play all those low growly tones with a regular guitar.

ElGuitarrista · Post by **ElGuitarrista** » Mon Mar 29, 2004 2:14 am

Based on my knowledge and brief research, you cannot get great results tuning a standard guitar down to B-B tuning. Even with medium strings, they will be very loose and probably sound really bad. Also, there may be intonation issues (the guitar will not be in tune in the higher frets), though I don't know this for sure and really can't articulate it. I do know that baritone guitars have longer scales to compensate for the intonation issue. FYI... I bought a baritone acoustic a few months ago.

grock · Post by **grock** » Mon Mar 29, 2004 4:16 pm

ElGuitarrista wrote:Based on my knowledge and brief research, you cannot get great results tuning a standard guitar down to B-B tuning. Even with medium strings, they will be very loose and probably sound really bad. Also, there may be intonation issues (the guitar will not be in tune in the higher frets), though I don't know this for sure and really can't articulate it. I do know that baritone guitars have longer scales to compensate for the intonation issue. FYI... I bought a baritone acoustic a few months ago.

it's the same reason that bass guitars have such long necks. there are a number of bob dylan songs in drop C capo 4 so the tuning would be EC#F#BD#G#.

there are some crazy mathmatics behind the scale length versus the added tension of fretting, and we actually derived something in physics but i'll get out my notes and come back here.