Baritone

When Don Ross and I first talked about building a guitar, he suggested a Baritone, thus appealing to his love of musical tones at the lower end of the scale. Having never tried or even considered building one before caused me to approach this project cautiously. The result, thankfully, was a success and has prompted me to add the Baritone to my line of instruments.

First of all, I should explain that a Baritone guitar falls roughly between a standard guitar and a bass, generally being tuned to ‘B’ or ‘C’ instead of ‘E’. Because there are no established rules regarding the Baritone, however, the design ends up varying from builder to builder. The following describes my approach to building this unique instrument.

For the back & sides we chose Padouk, an African hardwood of medium density and striking red colour. I’ve also been equally successful with both Rosewood and Maple.

The scale length I originally chose was 27" (686mm). I know that some builders have gone as long as 30" (760mm), but I wanted a reasonable compromise between bass response and playability. The results were so good that I’ve stuck with it. In addition, I've recently introduced a 28" (711 mm) scale option, thus giving Baritone players a better choice to suit their needs.  Because of the extra thick bass string, (more on this later) we opted for a width at the nut of 1 13/16" (46mm), thereby maintaining enough space. This isn’t fixed in stone and there’s no reason for not using another dimension there.

The body shape chosen is the SJ 17" (432mm) jumbo size. Originally Don wanted a large body and I also felt that the big size would help accent the bass response.

The bracing is essentially the same as standard model but with modifications to suit the string tension difference and the longer scale.

On Don’s original, he requested a bridge which loaded the strings from the back as opposed to using bridge pins. If a string broke while on stage, he could change it quickly and easily. The design worked well and I now offer it as an option.

Since the Baritone string sets are hard to come by we came up with a good solution. I take a light or medium acoustic set and eliminate the high ‘E’ string. The ‘B’ becomes the high string and a .066 is added at the bottom. This combination works well, though some players have gone as thick as .080 for the bass. As I said, there are no rules here.

Though my efforts so far have proven successful, I am sure that further changes are in store as I learn more about this fascinating instrument.