What Is A Baritone Guitar?

The word baritone is usually defined for a male voice in a range between tenor and bass. Frank Sinatra I guess would be the most popular example. The word baritone is also applied to musical instruments as well. The most popular being maybe a baritone trumpet or sax. These instruments play in a range a little lower than a standard trumpet or tenor sax.

My Tip #1 on this site addresses this issue a little. Without even realizing what I was doing at the time, age 15 or so, I made my own baritone guitar by lowering the tuning of my guitar from standard tuning E A D G B E to C# F# B E G# C#. I have a baritone voice and would learn a really cool song only to find out later I couldn't sing it because it was keyed too high. The major problem was, the intonation of the instrument was thrown off because lowering the tuning of a guitar properly also requires the scale length of the neck to be lengthened. That's why bass guitars have such long necks. Standard scale length for a guitar tuned up to pitch (E A D G B E) would be around 25 2/5 inches, a baritone guitar tuned (B thru B) would be use a scale length of around 26 1/8 to 27 inches. The gauges of the strings for a baritone guitar would also have to be a little heavier like maybe ranging from .014 - .068 inches.

There are a few guitars manufactured to properly correct for this situation. Santa Cruz makes a Bob Brozman Baritone guitar with a 27" neck scale designed to be tuned down 2 or 3 half steps. Although Taylor doesn't market it as such, the Leo Kottke 12 string is designed to be tuned in the baritone range as well.