Baritone guitars, liminal zones and the economy of pub gigs.

I had a Danelectro baritone guitar, a reissue of a fifties model, for a few years in the late nineties.  It was pretty cheap - around $400 - so I impulse-bought it at Lakeshore Music in Burlington.  I used it for a guitar solo on my album Been Here And Gone in 2000 and not long after traded it for a used Camry, a trade that I actually regret.  In between I found a use for it that was, as I thought at the time, undiscussed.  Actually, I can't remember knowing very much at all about the uses of baritone guitars.  I knew that they had been on spaghetti Western soundtracks and Nashville studios in the sixties, often doubling string bass (leading to the studio term "tic-tac bass").  The closest thing that I saw or played prior to the mid-nineties was the Fender Bass VI, which was originally produced from 1961 to 1975.  But the Bass VI is really a six-string bass, a guitar an octave down.  The Wikipedia article on baritone guitars does not make a distinction between the Fender Bass VI and baritone guitars, and seems to suggest that baritone guitars were used on Pet Sounds and "Hey Jude," which I think is misleading. 

The baritone guitar is six stringed, tuned halfway between a guitar and a bass, B E A D F# B (low to high).  That's a scary looking tuning (especially the F#!) but it's just standard guitar tuning down a perfect fourth.  But it's the tuning, in a kind of liminal space between guitar and bass ranges, that defines the baritone.  It's really the only way, short of adding two strings, to be able to passably represent guitar and bass at the same time on the fly.  The "on the fly" part is important, because retaining the six-string design keeps things simple and keeps neck widths down.  If I was on a pickup acoustic gig, I wanted to be able to move around the neck easily, since I was probably transposing the chords of the song in my head at the same time.

At the time, I was playing with the Kevin MacLean Band around Hamilton.  Kevin was just starting to expand beyond performing as a single and booking small band dates.  For cramped pubs we could play as a trio, with the drummer on stand-up cocktail kit and myself on baritone guitar.  With Kevin's acoustic guitar filling in the harmony, I covered bass lines and could throw in credible sounding solos.  It was a easy, low-tech way for a three-piece to sound like a four-piece.  

I can see this idea working for acoustic pub bands, though I haven't seen, through the recent boomlet of baritone guitar interest, anyone playing one live. Maybe that's because I've ignored recent metal, where the "nu metal" downtuning of Korn and Deftones has led to a resurgence of black, pointy baritone guitars.  It stands to reason that nothing assaults the colon like subsonic power chords.  Another contemporary take on the baritone idea is the acoustic baritone guitar.  Vicki Genfan and Al Petteway sound wonderful on it, which suggests to me that the acoustic baritone has all kinds of possibilities as a solo fingerstyle instrument.

All of the above was inspired by a post over at Guitarz on baritone Telecasters, an idea whose time has come.  Now I see from my reading that Duane Eddy used a baritone guitar.  When I was a really small child I loved my mother's record of Twangy Guitar and Silky Strings.  Perhaps my baritone desires are deep-seated.  Maybe it's time for a conversion.