Homebuilt Baritone, now £240 £280 London SE4

[Mediocre Polymath]

Some of you may know that I make basses as a hobby. I also make guitars. Once, as an experiment, I made something in-between.

 

That's right, we've got another baritone guitar on the marketplace. I made this in 2019 when I was experimenting with some ideas for my fretted bass. While it's an interesting thing, plays wonderfully and sounds great, I'm not really enough of a guitarist to need it much. It's just taking up space in the rack.

 

I know "baritone" can mean a lot of different things, but in this case I would say that it's more a big guitar than a small bass (which is why I'm sticking it here, and not in the main marketplace). It's got a scale length of 710 mm (27.95 inches in old money), and is currently tuned B1-E2-A2-D3-F#3-B3 (like a regular guitar, but down a fourth) with a set of 56–11 d'Addario XLs.

 

In terms of vital statistics, it weighs about 4.2 kg (9 lb 4 oz) per my bathroom scales – so heavy for a guitar, but pretty normal for a bass – and it has an overall length of 106.4 cm, which is about the same as a Fender Mustang bass (it lives in a Fender short-scale bass gig bag). The nut width is 43 mm, with the same string-to-string spacing as a stratocaster.

 

The bridge is a tune-o-matic with the saddles filed to match the 9.5 in radius on the fingerboard. The neck profile was copied from my 1970s Ibanez Studio, and is broadly the same as a standard Fender. It measures about 22 mm thick at the first fret (measured with the strings on). The action is pretty low, about 1.2 mm at the 12th fret on the treble side, and 1.4 mm on the bass, with no buzzes, dead frets or rattles anywhere on the neck.

 

It's got the standard two humbuckers (Stewart-MacDonald "Golden Age" PAFs) with a three-way switch, volume and tone, but it also has a coil-split switch that acts on both pickups. I tried various incarnations of active buffer circuits in the quite generously sized control cavity, trying to match the output of the single coils and humbuckers, but none of them sounded that great to my ears, so I've taken it out now. There's no gubbins and no battery in this.

 

This would normally be the point at which I'd mention a few minor quirks and blemishes, and here I'm a little unsure what to say. This is a more-or-less wholly hand-made instrument, assembled on a workbench in the garden of a house in south London – it's been made with care and (if I say so myself) a reasonable amount of skill, but judged by the standards of a CNC'd or master-built instrument, it's mostly blemish. The big things would probably be the finish on the neck, which is slighly discoloured in places, some bumps and divots on the back of the body, and the neck pocket, which I made slightly too deep and then had to shim up with tapered strips of maple.

 

As I mentioned, I have a gig bag for this, but no hard case (not even sure if you could get one that fits), so I'd really rather not attempt to ship it. I'd be happy for potential buyers to come by and give it a play (I've got a Fender Champ clone with a sealed 1x10 cab that does the low end well).

 

 

 

 

(I'm including this to show the Spector-style curve on the body, which was a weight-saving thing).

 

Edited October 12 by Mediocre Polymath

[Mediocre Polymath]

So, I'm sticking this in here as a sort of footnote on an already much-too-long description, because it's worth explaining a little of the background behind those little string extender thingies you can see in the close up picture.

 

When you're designing a new instrument, there's always something you forget to consider. With this one it was the overall length from the string anchor to the tuning peg. The overall length of this guitar's high-B, from anchor to anchor, is a whopping 990 mm.

 

As it turns out, this is too long for most brands' guitar strings to work (at least with the non-locking tuners I designed it with originally). Ernie Ball strings generally have an overall length of 39 inches (990 mm), d'Addario always aim for "at least a metre", and Rotosound are about the same. Each of those brands have strings they market as being for "baritone guitars", but while these are much heavier gauge (too heavy, I'd argue for most common baritone tunings) they're not actually any longer than normal guitar strings.

 

For the first few years I played this guitar, I used Jim Dunlop strings because for some reason, they're all 46 inches (1160 mm) long. They're not a brand you often see in physical shops though, so I added the little doodads to effectively move the anchor point forward far enough that I could use more easily-available strings.

 

With locking tuners, you don't need anywhere near as much overage at the tuning peg, so I think you could probably take these off and still have a reasonable selection of brands. I also suspect longer strings will  become more common now that all the metal boys are playing weird multi-scale things.   

[Burns-bass]

What an amazing hobby. I’m really impressed you’re able to do all of this. 
 

Good luck with everything.

[Mediocre Polymath]

1 hour ago, Burns-bass said:

What an amazing hobby. I’m really impressed you’re able to do all of this. 
 

Good luck with everything.

 Thanks. I've decided, having been making instruments for long enough to get good at it, that I need to go off and find something entirely new to be terrible at.