Baritone and Brass Pins

[L20A]

I'm trying different things to see what will make good changes to my Alvarez Bartione guitar.

I was wondering if anyone has tried or has an idea as to how brass bridge pins might change the tone.

I'm looking to clear up some of the muddiness or loss of definition that I get when strumming the guitar.

I know that it is the nature of the beast but perhaps brass pins and or a brass saddle would help.

I will be keeping the baritone tuned B to B so I'm not interested in tuning up to help with definition and clarity.

[H2O]

What strings are you using/have you tried? I have a Halcyon baritone guitar and like to use Elixers for longevity, but prefer the tone of John Pearse set #3280M which are 80/20 Bronze strings (gauge .017 to .70). That heavier gauge helps with note articulation in my experience.

[ChalkLitIScream]

Adding more mass to the bridge tends to give a brighter sound and a small boost to the trebles. Do you think that would help your situation?

[L20A]

Originally Posted by ChalkLitIScream

Adding more mass to the bridge tends to give a brighter sound and a small boost to the trebles. Do you think that would help your situation?

That is what I'm going after.
Clearer trebles and more individual string clarity.

[Tony Done]

I tried brass pins many years ago, but they didn't last long, so I mustn't have been impressed with the sound. More recently I was experimenting with ways to tame the bright edge on my kona, to shift the balance towards the high mids just a little. I found that three brass pins did the trick.

[Bax Burgess]

A brass saddle adds clarity, but at some cost of richness. The sizes available are limited. Brass will file and sand easily enough, though, if the bridge slot is too wide, then you'll have to pad the space - using brass sheet, you will need cutters. An alternative is corian for the saddle, which adds clarity and volume, overpowering for particular guitars.

[Tony Done]

Originally Posted by Bax Burgess

A brass saddle adds clarity, but at some cost of richness. The sizes available are limited. Brass will file and sand easily enough, though, if the bridge slot is too wide, then you'll have to pad the space - using brass sheet, you will need cutters. An alternative is corian for the saddle, which adds clarity and volume, overpowering for particular guitars.

I made an aluminium saddle for one guitar. It is OK, bright and clear, and aluminium (actually the common structural alloy as found in handyman stores) is very easy to work.

[Wade Hampton]

L20A, while I've never liked the sound that brass bridge pins impart to the instruments they're mounted on, given the tone you say you you're getting, brass pins might possibly push the tone more towards the direction you say you want. A brass bridge saddle, though, would be more like a crime against music. You'd basically be pulling a musical Sherman's March Through Georgia, a scorched earth policy destroying everything that stands in its path. The tone would NOT be improved.

There was a blessedly brief fashion for brass appointments all around on acoustic guitars towards the end of the 1970's, and I can still recall a fellow instructor at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk who took his fine-sounding Martin M-38 and totally boogered up the tone by putting brass pins, nut and saddle on it. Then he tried to convince me and my buddy to do the same with our guitars.

On that Martin, what had been a really sweet-sounding instrument was turned into something that sounded more like a buzzsaw, or perhaps a giant demented dental tool.

Now, your Alvarez is not a Martin and it won't have the same tonal potential as that guitar that idiot shouldn't have been allowed to own. But a brass saddle would be overkill on it, believe me.

Something else you need to consider, something I had to figure out and confront during the first year I owned my McAlister baritone, is that it has
much different attack tendencies than my standard guitars, with more sustain and fewer upper partials to add sparkle and clarity.

In other words, acoustic baritone guitars require a somewhat different picking hand attack than what you're used to. Now while the acoustic baritone guitar is clearly an easily learned guitar family variant, it's a mistake to think of it as nothing but a lower-tuned guitar.

It's not, it's just as much its own separate instrument as the electric bass is a different instrument from standard six string guitars. Different attack and sustain characteristics completely. So you need to start thinking about your right hand attack control in a more analytical way. With your fretting hand, you're going to need to start finding two and three string chord voicings to replace the full fix or six string chords you've been playing for however many years you've been at it. You'll sound better if you do. Campfire first position singalong accompaniment chords generally do NOT work all that well on a baritone. With your picking hand, you're going to need to be more aware of where and how hard you play the strings, how close your picking attack is to the bridge, and a bunch of other aspects like that.

Then start switching that stuff around until you can find a mix of chord voicings and attack phrasing that gives you the sort of tonal clarity you're not getting now.

It's perfectly attainable on your baritone, I can assure you. A good friend of mine up here in Chugiak has one of those Alvarezs (which she went out and bought after she played my McAlister,) and I can get it to do whatever I need a song to do. It doesn't have to be a high end handbuilt baritone to be musically articulate. It's completely doable.

But you need to start thinking your way through exactly what you're doing, at least until you familiarize yourself with the baritone till the point it becomes second nature and you don't have to think through every little thing on it anymore.

You can skip all that sort of analytical work and sort of accidentally up end with a sound and an attack that will work better for you. But it's a lot faster if you simply start being more mindful about these different aspects of attack, sustain and musical phrasing.

Sure, continue to experiment with strings, setup, saddles and bridge pins if you like, but 90% of getting to where you want to be on the baritone is going to come from thinking through what you're doing and how you're doing it, not by tinkering with peripheral issues like bridge pins.

Hope that makes sense.


Wade Hampton Miller

[L20A]

Thanks for the ideas and suggestions.
Wade I totally understand what you are saying.

I use my baritone on several songs in my band.
The songs that I have chosen to use it on compliment the deep tone.
I don't strum it but rather pick out notes or partial chords that sound right.

I will get some brass pins and experiment with them.
They probably wont give me what I'm looking for but they are cheap to try.

[Wade Hampton]

Originally Posted by L20A

Thanks for the ideas and suggestions.
Wade I totally understand what you are saying.

It took me about a year of serious woodshedding to where I was facile on the baritone, and that's a record. I've got the "multi-instrumentalist gene," and normally it takes me about two days, maybe a week tops to figure out how to be effective on an unfamiliar type of stringed instrument.

I mean, they're all kind of the same thing, in a way, so it's not that tough. Plus, I'm not striving for instrumental virtuosity on each instrument, but practical stageworthy competence, which is considerably more attainable. The first takes a lifetime, the second isn't nearly the same challenge, particularly once you have a bunch of other instruments under your belt. The more of them you learn, the faster you'll instinctively spot how to unlock the next one.

That said, the baritone was one of the few I found challenging in terms of being able to pick it up and just use instinctively. I had to be much more analytical because my usual fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants approach just wasn't getting me very far.

Originally Posted by L20A

I use my baritone on several songs in my band.
The songs that I have chosen to use it on compliment the deep tone.
I don't strum it but rather pick out notes or partial chords that sound right.

I will get some brass pins and experiment with them.
They probably wont give me what I'm looking for but they are cheap to try.

Hey, might as well. But I have to issue you our official warning: if you desecrate that Alvarez with a brass bridge saddle, members of the Secret Brotherhood Of Baritone Guitar Owners will have to track you down and confiscate it.

You won't see us coming, either. You'll just say: "Hey, there's another one of those chubby-faced middle-aged white guys I've been seeing around lately. I'm not sure if he realizes that wearing cargo shorts with open toed sandals and short black socks is NOT a good fashion choice for him: his legs kinda look like frozen french fries...."

Lost in those profound thoughts, it'll be over before you even realize what happened. You'll think: "Hey, where did my baritone go? And what happened to that chubby-faced guy?"

Fair warning, dude....

Seriously, do what you want to your guitar, it's yours. But I've been told by representatives from the Vatican that putting brass saddles on acoustic guitars WILL result in automatic time in Purgatory, where your job will be to sell game tokens to hyperactive children at a Chuck E Cheese franchise at a failing suburban strip mall.

So be aware of the possible consequences!


Wade Hampton Miller

[tippy5]

Timely, I am getting my Baritone Alvarez soon. I appreciate the INFO.
I love a mind over muscle memory challenge if i can get a new lower register.
Although I am not looking forward to the tension and fret spacing.
I plan on partial chord melodies and travis picking with that Low B.

Did anyone thicken the stock strings Alvarez ships with?
80/20's or PB is the preferred Asian import baritone formula?

Hope you lose the mud, find musical zones and brighten up the voice.
BTW: I liked brass pins on my $400 Gretsch 00, Rancher Jr.

[Wade Hampton]

Tippy, as I've mentioned I don't have one of the Alvarez baritones, but I consider experimenting string alloys and gauges essential to figuring out what a player is going to do with one of these instruments. I ran through quite a few different string combinations until I hit on what works best for my McAlister, and that was without the benefit of the vastly greater number of prepared acoustic baritone string sets available today. There just weren't many prepackaged baritone sets to be found back then.

I got the McAlister just before Thanksgiving, 1999, and by that point I'd been a John Pearse strings artist endorser for a couple of years. So naturally I asked John if he could run up a handful of different low B strings for me, in gauges running from .066 way up to .080, because I really didn't know what was going to work, how I'd end up tuning it, or exactly how I could best utilize the instrument in performance.

John told me that he wasn't set up well to wind small numbers of single gauges, but recommended I talk to the folks at LaBella. He told me that once I'd figured what strings worked best, he'd put them into production for me.

The folks at LaBella couldn't have been nicer or more helpful, and I got a small selection of offbeat handwound low strings from them (some of which I still have left over in a drawer somewhere, the superheavy ones, mostly.) Later I also got some Newtone strings from the equally kind Mr. Newton in the UK, when I decided to see if round core strings would work better on the guitar for me than the octagonal core strings I'd been using.

The roundcore Newtones didn't have any musical or playability benefits to them that made them better for my use than the regular octagonal core strings, even though they're lovely strings. So it's likely that some of them remain in that "Island of Lost Baritone Guitar Strings" box with the unneeded LaBella prototypes.

I just realized that my McAlister arrived in Anchorage the day before Thanksgiving eighteen years ago. Which means it's now legally old enough to vote. I'll have to swing by the courthouse downtown for it to be registered, I guess...

Okay, back to strings: eventually I hit upon the gauges that worked best for my playing using a B to B tuning with the same note intervals as standard guitar tuning - low to high:

.070, .056, .045, .032, 024, .017

John kept his promise and put the strings into production as the John Pearse 3280M medium gauge baritone set. If I remember correctly, my buddy Mycroft in Seattle uses the next set down for his Beneteau baritone, the 3260L Light gauge set.

So it does take a bit of time to see what strings work best on any of these baritones, because of scale lengths, playing styles, tunings used and any number of other factors. But one big advantage you baritone newbies have over crusty old acoustic baritone guitar pioneers like Mycroft and me is that, unlike us back in the olden days, you can just hop online, spend $50 and have a few sets to try out delivered to your house by three days later.

POSSIBLE ACTUAL PHOTO OF ACOUSTIC BARITONE GUITAR PIONEER "MYCROFT":



HE PROBABLY WON'T USE THAT PISTOL ON YOU UNLESS YOU SMUDGE OR SCRATCH ONE OF HIS GUITARS

Hope this helps.


Wade Hampton Miller

[Mycroft]

Can't help you with the brass bridge pin or saddle idea. I've come across several guitars with brass pins, and generally did not like them. A bit shrill, I thought. Sort of like the tone from a dental drill. But I did not A/B them so don't know what the guitar sounded like without.

I do know some lap steels use metal nuts or saddles. With an acoustic, though, I suspect that it would be more metallic than earthy, and while i may improve one part of the sonic spectrum, there is no way to know it it might degrade another part.

That I don't see brass or bronze saddles with any regularity is enough of a reason to give me pause at the thought. The one nice things abut the pins is that you can use them on individual strings. But remember: the increase in mass will effect adjacent strings too...

WHM has already touched on the need to adjust technique. I primarily fingerpick, and had a really hard time with getting a decent tone from my low string using just the meat of my thumb like I did on the Mac or Froggy. I finally had to learn to use a thumbpick to get a decent tone. You already use a flatpick, it sounds like. But how your attack is on the string may be an issue that is possible to better for this instrument.

The ther question, that someone else asked and I did not see that you answered, is what strings are you using on it? Not only gauge, but alloy. I was warned by Wade about this, but I found that my Bari was extremely finicky about strings, gauges and alloys. I don't know what the Alvarez comes with or you have on it, but you might want to do some experimenting, not just with sets but individual strings. I wound up with mostly Pearse light baritones, or sometimes a standard medium set moved south one string and a .068 on the 6th. Currently I am playing a lot of Open-D stuff, so the Baritone is in Open A, same replationships. I'm having to experiment a bit with gauges again for that. To keep the 1st and 6th from being too floppy. (I go by feel a lot.) My Bari is backed with Padouk, a rosewood family wood, so responds well to alloys that favor rosewoods. 80/20.

Finally, a thing to keep is mind is that the Alvarez is actually a pretty cheap, inexpensive guitar, with laminate back and sides. It does come with some sonic deficiencies, else no one would buy the more expensive ones. Basically what you have there is a gateway instrument. You might want to try and play some good ones before spending too much time trying to row against the tide. (I've played several Alverez's. Nice for what they are. But I've all played baritones by Godall, DL Noble, a bunch by David Webber, Brooks, Santa Cruz, National, Roy McAlister (including Wade's) and more, all before getting my Beneteau. Playing some others might help you to understand that you can only take the Alvarez so far.

I don't mean to dump on your (or anyone's) guitar. But I think that you would be better served looking at strings and how you play it.

OMMV

TW

[Mycroft]

Originally Posted by Wade Hampton

POSSIBLE ACTUAL PHOTO OF ACOUSTIC BARITONE GUITAR PIONEER "MYCROFT":



HE PROBABLY WON'T USE THAT PISTOL ON YOU UNLESS YOU SMUDGE OR SCRATCH ONE OF HIS GUITARS

More likely if you get into my single-malt without asking. Hands off the Lagavulin.

[Wade Hampton]

Originally Posted by Mycroft

(Nice, thoughtful post abridged) - I think that you would be better served looking at strings and how you play it.

Exactly. Strings and playing attack are the two most important variables any of us playing baritone guitars have to work with. Thinking through your chord voicings and timing are probably the next two most important.


whm