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Old 01-28-2010, 10:49 AM
Explorer Explorer is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2010
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I play eight-string electric guitar, and the stringing tension is fairly progressive (meaning increasing in tension from top to bottom). There have been some good conversations about it on the forums at sevenstring.org; that’s not surprising, since the seven- and eight-string guitars aren’t all of the same scale length, and there are few stock string sets available. There is much better information, and much less name calling than on the site a previous poster mentions.

For electric extended range guitars (and I’ll get to acoustic guitars in a moment), there comes a point where one can have a great feeling tension at the bottom end… but the tone changes from the spanking, popping tone of guitar to the thud of the bass. In order to preserve that tone, people are going to longer scale lengths in order to use lighter strings with more body in the tone. Although I have a guitar with a low Bb0 at the 25.5” scale length, it’s really a rarity for that site.

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I use two main tunings on my acoustics, standard (for both E and for B baritone) and full fifths (C2 G2 D3 A3 E4 B4). All the guitars are 25.5” scale length, and are between OM and dreadnaught in size.

I find that I actually get better and more balanced sound using strings closer to the skewed tension common to acoustic sets. Even on the custom sets I put together myself for the full fifths tuning, the tension profile lightens up a bit on the bass string. I found that to be surprising, but even the string set I use for the baritone stringing on the standard-length Rainsong is close to a heavy set in terms of tension distribution.
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