In early 2006 a copy of a guitar magazine landed on my kitchen table – unusual, since I had been subscribing to Guitar Player Magazine for many years but stopped reading it because most of the content didn’t interest me that much anymore. There was nothing in that sample issue able to convert me to become a subscriber again, except for a short review of a really nice looking baritone guitar. I had never played or knowingly heard a baritone guitar but the idea of an instrument with a range somewhere between a bass and an ordinary guitar sounded fascinating. After I received the guitar I noticed that they had sent the version without pickup. I sent it back and a few weeks later received the correct model – which had a strange rattling sound. I sent that one back and a few weeks later received yet another one. Lo and behold the third one was good. It has a very deep body to accommodate the lower tuning and with a really long neck the frets are further apart.
Like with most unusual instruments I have bought over the years I didn’t quite know what to actually play on it once I got over how beautiful it looked. I also had no idea what clef to use when writing stuff for the baritone tuning. Eventually I settled on bass clef which proved to be more difficult than I thought. Somehow, when I read music on the bass my brain seems to automatically decode music in bass clef and when I play guitar it feels hardwired to treble clef.
To me this instrument sounds very ‘americana’. Open chords sound so full and gutsy. The first recording project with this guitar was a handful of acoustic guitar tunes – well, kinda ‘instrumental americana’, where the baritone replaced bass and rhythm guitar. As of this writing, July 2010, I am wrapping up the preproduction of ‘Griffy Lake Suite’, a nine-part through-composed piece for baritone guitar and string quintet. While I am still struggling to play any of my normal guitar stuff on this thing it is very inspiring to use it for composing.