Baritone with Sitka Spruce
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Today's acoustic baritone guitar is not a very well standardized instrument. Asking 10 musicians what their idea of a baritone guitar is might very well solicit 10 very different answers. Most can agree that it is a guitar designed to live somewhere between a standard acoustic guitar and a bass guitar. Beyond that it is open to interpretation.
When I set out to build a steel stringed baritone acoustic guitar, I had a few goals in mind. First and foremost, I decided that chords played on it must sound every bit as clear and sonorous as my standard scale guitars. If you have ever tried to play chords on a bass guitar (or a lot of baritone guitars) you know that as scale length increases, chords tend to become ill-defined and muddy. With my baritone I did not want to build a short scale bass guitar limited to melody and 2 note chords. On the other end of the spectrum I wanted the bass notes to be crystal clear and robust. I decided that if the bass was not there then it would not matter if chords sound as good as my standard guitars.
After trying several bracing schemes, scale lengths, string guages, and alternate tunings, I settled on a 28.5" scale using commercially available string sets tuned like a standard guitar but down a 4th to B E A D F# B. This baritone is surprisingly small: the lower bout measures only 15.5" and the body is only 4" deep, making it between an OM and Drednought in size. I found that utilizing myvoicing techniques I could get an excellent bass note at this scale length while still allowing for powerful chords with great clarity and note separation. Even at .5" shorter scale I discovered that the bass string had to be physically huge to compete with the other strings in terms of volume, and then the notes started sounding 'off' as I moved up the fretboard. Likewise any longer scale length and chord voicings started to fall apart. I have found that a 28.5" scale with my bracing creates a baritone that plays like a normal guitar, but with an extra level of bottom end: truly the best of both worlds.
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