I'm hankering after trying baritone tuning. Obviously it's going to need different strings to my normal setup, so would make sense to dedicate a guitar to it, but the one I have in mind is Floyd Rose equipped. Anyone on here tried this and do you have any tips?
I blame this on listening to too much Avatar thanks to an introduction to them on the STW Rock & Metal playlist on Spotify!
Steinberger Synapse.
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We played in standard b tuning and I just used my regular guitar. It could handle the down tuning of I used decent heavy gauge strings. I absolutely hate floating bridges though, got rid of my guitar that has one when we decided to drop the tuning. I can heartily recommend Fernandes Monterey. Rock solid at low tunings with out a floating bridge. For locking terms or other guitarist swore by ibanez.
With a Floyd Rose will be a nightmare initially to setup....then it'll not make any odds until you want to change tuning..
I'd be more concerned about scale length tbh. Stringwise, gods knows 12-56 I'd guess.
There's a difference between a baritone guitar and a detuned regular guitar. Baritone guitars use heavier strings (e.g. 13 to 72) on a longer scale length neck with beefed up construction. They're like a halfway house between guitar and bass.
I'd imagin you could use a normal guitar, but I'd think putting heavier strings on would involve filing the nuts and possibly adjusting the truss rod and also the height of the string at the nut and bridge to avoid rattling the fret board. Might not but I'd be prepared to maybe have to do them.
Hmm, not quite a 'try it on a whim' type of thing then!
I'd figured intonation would be right out, so was probably going to linger around the low end of things. Might give it a go when I have a weekend spare and see what happens.
Ideally it would be an excuse for another guitar purchase, but that would not be domestically acceptable in the middle of an extension build!
You can't have enough guitars 😀
aye inonation would be right out, none of the things is particularly difficult mind, but if its first time you will be fiddling and it'll be a while till you're happy i'd guess.
I tried it on my hrr strat, blocked the trem and just didn't stress much about intonation but the main issue I had was [i]epic[/i] fret buzz. Because it was a temporary bodge I just lifted the nut a little with shims underneath and slackened the rod a little. Eh, possibly raised the trem, I forget. Basically this all conspired to make a guitar that didn't really play very well, but, was good enough to try out the sound. For some reason the single coils sounded incredibly unbalanced but it had a dimebucker in the bridge which suited it pretty well 😆
Oh- depending on the age and build of the guitar, returning it to standard may not be the reverse, the neck on mine relaxed a bit and didn't settle back exactly the same so it needed a bit of setup work to get it back to scratch. But these 90s fenders could be a bit like that anyway so maybe you'll be fine.
The floyd rose is usually a total pain in the arse but it actually made some of this this stuff a bit easier- you don't need to worry about fatter strings in the nut and you've got some powerful bodges that don't work in normal guitars for string height etc.
Oh OK, so then I bought a BC Rich Virgin 7 for practically nothing on ebay, because moar guitarz.
Did I miss the bit where you mention the tuning you're after?
If it's moar brootz you need, buy an ERG (7 or 8, there are more tabs for 7 than 8 though).
I use 10-52 for drop c on a 25.5 scale guitar and it feels and sounds spot on.
Realistically, unless you think you'd play a baritone or erg loads, I'd just buy another guitar with a fixed bridge and down tune.
On a Tele:
Down to D, retune.
Down to C, 52 string.
Down to B, as above but it's somewhat flappy. The nut would need refiling to take thicker strings which I'm not going to do on a neck I like. Besides, I've got a bass.