GCEA Strings For Baritone

My dad gave me an old made in Japan Hy Lo baritone ukulele. I put new strings on it and played around but really didn't play it much. Came downstairs today and one of the strings is broken. My boys had friends spend the night last night and I had it laying out. At least I had everything else in it's cases.

I am wanting to buy some new strings but I am thinking about trying some GCEA tuned strings. Any recommendations?

Aquila makes a set of Nylgut 'Baritone' GCEA strings, which are re-entrant tuning, but you can probably just use a 'wound third' classical guitar string that is 0.027" if you want a low G on baritone scale length.

On the same site linked above, the GHS Vanguard Classics, D'Addario NYL028W and Thomastik-Infeld CF27 should work well for this.

I prefer the Thomastik-Infeld CF27 since is it CHROME FLATWOUND and has much less string squeak and finger noise than the others, and much less than the Fremont Soloist polished wound low-G that others will probably recommend.

Disclaimer: I am NOT compensated by nor affiliated with stringsbymail.com, I only used them as a reference since I am familair with their inventory, having bought from them MANY times and have been very happy with both the pricing and shipping times. Other sites may also have similar strings.

southcoast lights [on a favilla and sounds fantastic,aquila gcea for bari[works well on my laminate

Why would you want GCEA on a bari? It seems when I have tried the G C E A Aquila strings...both linear and reentrant, that it looses the full, rich sound found with the bigger body that they have with DGBE tuning. It seems to me to sound like a tenor that's just bigger and more bother to move.

TheCraftedCow said:

Why would you want GCEA on a bari? It seems when I have tried the G C E A Aquila strings...both linear and reentrant, that it looses the full, rich sound found with the bigger body that they have with DGBE tuning. It seems to me to sound like a tenor that's just bigger and more bother to move.

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Just figured I would give it a try. I rarely touched it as a baritone. Having sold all my other ukes, I am starting to miss them. New strings are cheaper than a new uke. I play guitar a little also and I usually grab it to play.

TheCraftedCow said:

Why would you want GCEA on a bari? It seems when I have tried the G C E A Aquila strings...both linear and reentrant, that it looses the full, rich sound found with the bigger body that they have with DGBE tuning. It seems to me to sound like a tenor that's just bigger and more bother to move.

Click to expand...

Maybe he does not want to transpose or re-learn the chords names from C6 to G TUNING?

Also, due to the laws of physics, the baritone with a larger body (soundbox) will project more and be louder than a tenor, which could be a factor if playing often in a group setting and you want to be sure to be heard...

Another issue is that if floppy string tension bothers you on smaller scale ukes, the Aquila GCEA Nylgut bari strings on 19" are great, and even on an 18" scale instrument they are still good.

Further, when I tried normal TENOR Aquilas on the 18" scale (Zither Heaven 'tenor' banjolele), it kept snapping the A string, due to the tension being too high, but the Aquila GCEA bari set worked fine on this instrument.

Being a banjolele, there were not any signifivant bass tones to speak of any way, and in fact it sounds great with these strings.

So there could be a few reasons to try it. In my case it solved a few problems.

Good info! Thanks.