Baritone Experiment - thoughts/advice welcome

[IndianHillMike]

In this case my concerns with scale length mostly have to do with bridge position and play-ability. If you end up with a really long neck that sticks way off the body, the guitar might sit and balance awkwardly while playing. You can counteract that by moving the bridge closer to the lower bout but that might put the bridge in a less ideal spot tone wise.

If it's possible, I'd recommend trying various baritones and seeing if any particular scale length feels/sounds the best to you. Then it's up to your luthier to mess around with bridge placement based on that scale length and they can recommend whether you might want to go longer/shorter. If you're okay with having an unconventional neck/body joint it will definitely make things easier as far as bridge positioning. Instead of the standard joint at the 12th or 14th fret, you might end up with 15 1/4 fret joint or something.


Mike

Originally Posted by atticus1019

Thanks Mike, that’s really valuable information. The donor guitar has a body length of 19 3/4" and a total length of 40 3/8”. What kind of scale length do you think it could sustain?

[colins]

Originally Posted by atticus1019

I’ll have to look at Italian. In some reading I’ve done, I see adi makes a good top for baritones because of its stiffness relative to some of the other spruces. Since I am saving on back and sides I’m thinking of springing for a torrified top.

Ideally I would like standard tuning to be B to b. I’ll be interested to see what kind of scale length we can get out of a slightly smaller body. I do intend for this to be a strummer as well as a picker so string tension is a concern especially since I enjoy a variety of open tunings. I’m hoping to get together with my friend later this week to talk more specifics. I’ll post some pics of the donor guitar later today if I can.

I've never owned an adi guiatr so I can't comment on them but I have several custom builds in Italian. In each case the choice came out of talking with the builder about the fact that I play lightly and still wanted a full tone.

And it would be great to see some images of the current guitar. You can show us the "before" and then sometime in the future the "after."