16th January 2024

My Baritone Guitar Project

I recently created a Baritone guitar.

So what is a Baritone guitar? It's basically a six-string guitar with a longer neck and a lower tuning. There are several different ways that strings can be tuned on a baritone guitar, but one of the most popular tunings is: B, E, A, D, F#, B          (from strings 6 to 1). This compares with E, A, D, G, B, E on a standard guitar. Baritones are often used in country music to give an extra-low and twangy effect - think Duane Eddy (Peter Gunn) or Glen Campbell (Galverston). They are also used by some heavy rock bands, although often in a 7-string format (where you tune it like a regular guitar but have an extra string at the bottom tuned to a B).

So is there actually any need to 'make' a special Baritone guitar? Why not just get a regular guitar such as a Fender Stratocaster and tune the strings down lower? Well you can, and some people do. But if you just use regular guitar strings you will have two problems. 1) The strings feel very loose and bendy 2) because of the bendiness of the strings it is hard to play them in tune - it's too easy to accidentally pull the strings down or up a little when playing 'fretted' notes (i.e. notes other than open strings), so that they sound sharp. So in order to maintain the tension in the strings there are two things you can do, and these are both done on Baritone guitars. Firstly, use thicker strings - you buy a set of baritone strings. Secondly, you can put a longer neck on the guitar. Making strings longer makes them lower in pitch and so does using thicker strings. You can now tune the strings to Baritone pitch and still have good tension in the strings.

So this is what I did! I purchased a 'Baritone' neck for about £60 on Amazon from a manufacturer in China. I was a little worried that the quality might not be great, but it turned out to be fine when it arrived. (You can buy a baritone neck from Fender for about £300 - which is odd since you can buy a whole Baritone guitar from Fender - well Squier, anyway - for not much more!). The neck I got was 27" scale (a standard Fender guitar neck is 25.5" - so it's 1.5" longer). You can also get necks that are 28" or 30" but I was worried that I would have to move the bridge on the guitar if I got one of those - more on that later.  27" seems to be the Fender standard for Baritones, and I was converting a Telecaster. In fact, the neck I chose was actually a Stratocaster neck - I knew it should fit fine onto a Telecaster body (whereas Telecaster necks can't be fitted easily onto Stratocaster guitars). It has a Rosewood fingerboard, which I generally prefer.

The guitar I was using was a silver Telecaster copy called an Alba. I was given it recently and liked the sound of the pickups but didn't like the neck very much - I'm not sure why! Maybe it's because the headstock looks a bit too fat and 'cartoonish'. Here is a picture of it:

Necks on Fender guitars (and on most Fender copies) are screwed onto the body. (This is different to Gibsons, which are glued on). So replacing a Fender-style neck should be fairly straightforward. However, the neck I ordered did not come with pre-drilled holes, so one tricky part of the job was to drill four holes in the right place. I used the original screws from the guitar, because I knew they should be the right length if the neck was a 'standard' shape. I used the metal neck 'plate' as a template to drill the holes, but this still required care, as the neck had to be perfectly straight, which meant the template also had to be placed exactly straight on the back of the neck, and in the correct vertical position for the neck to fit perfectly into the slot in the top of the guitar body.

With the neck attached, I then had to transfer the machine heads from the old neck onto the new one, which was fairly straightforward. The only issue was aligning the tuners using the six retaining screws so that they all lined up properly - it would have looked untidy and amateurish if they were not completely parallel with each other or were at the wrong angle. (Again, the new neck was not pre-drilled with screw holes for the machine heads). I also moved the two 'string trees' from the old neck to the new one. These are little metal guides that lower the strings between the machine heads and the nut so that the string hits the nut at a lower angle. I hope I've explained that right!

I could then put the new Baritone strings on - I used D'Adario XL (14 to 64 gauge). The bridge of my Telecaster allows you to either string through the body, or to 'topload' the strings (string through the end of the bridge). I decided to go through the body, as that is more usual, and some people claim that this method gives more sustain.

I then had to 'set up' the guitar. This involves first setting the height of the strings by individually adjusting the heights of the string 'saddles' using an Allen key. Generally, you want the strings as low as possible without ever buzzing against the frets. You then set the 'intonation' (so that each string stays in tune all the way up the neck), by changing the position of the saddle for each string using the long screw that the saddles are mounted on. This is a matter of trial and error, but using an electronic tuner helped me get it right. Finally, once the intonation was good, I made some further adjustments to the string saddle heights. (Setting the intonation by moving the saddles away from or towards the neck can alter the height of the string, which can introduce unwanted buzzing, or can raise the action a little too much).

(One note about the intonation for this particular project. I was worried that because the neck was longer, that I wouldn't be able to adjust the bridge saddles far enough back towards the bottom end of the bridge plate to achieve correct intonation. Since the scale length was 1.5" inches longer, then the distance from the 12th fret to the saddles would have to increase by half of that. So potentially I would need to move the saddles about 3/4" further down the body. It turned out that there was easily that much adjustment available, and my final outcome is that the saddles still have plenty of leeway for adjustment. It is my assumption that a 28" neck would have been 'touch and go' and that a 30" baritone neck would have been too long, and would have required some fairly drastic changes to the layout of the guitar, such as moving the bridge plate down the body and 'toploading' the strings. So I think 27" is the best option for a Telecaster or Stratocaster).

I re-tuned the guitar and plugged it into my amplifier, and it sounded great, especially when using the bridge pickup with the treble 'rolled off' a little (about a quarter of a turn).

Here is a picture of my finished Baritone Guitar. I love the look of the Strat headstock and the rosewood fingerboard!