JZ-6 Baritone Guitar, First Build
Hi …,
This is Blue Strings, father and son first time guitar builders. Well, that’s not strictly true… I did build an electric guitar by hand fifty years ago, when I was at school. It was a heavy beast, mainly made from oak with a mahogany fretboard: a strange hybrid with f-holes in a flat top, a tailpiece and a floating bridge. I can still remember double/triple checking the math to calculate fret positions. It took me months to save up pocket money and a summer job before I could buy the hardware. But I digress…
This guitar is for my son, the guitarist in the family, who, until recently, was a big fan of Snarky Puppy and the guitarist Mark Lettieri. We bought some of Marks tabs for baritones a couple of months ago. Down-tuning his Gretsch G5421 to attempt of his piece wasn’t particularly satisfying, so we decide to build a baritone as a summer project.
It’s taken me a while to get some extra tools and materials together, hours of research on staining and oils finishing, but I think we’re finally ready: we even got in some piece of Ash to test out staining and finishing techniques. I’m exited to see what my son does with his choice of stain colours.
What I thought would be a relatively “straight forward” build project (for a first-timers), has expanded to include multiple stains, cutting out body material to reposition pickups, swapping the bridge pickup for a single coil size Humbucker rail, sourcing and cutting a pick guard. And all with basic hand or electric tools. I’ve even had a go at sharpening my chisels…
However, there is one question I haven’t been able to answer, and that is about the strings.
With a 30in scale and a trem, the distance from the trem to nut is 85cm and from nut to the last tuning post is 15cm. This would require string lengths in excess of 100cm. Do Baritone strings come in that length?
Pictures of build will follow.
