Baritone Tuning

ash13brook

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A friend of mine just bought a baritone Uke. He wants me to teach him some stuff. Can a baritone be tuned to gCEA tuning? Would that require different strings?

Thanks,
Matt
 
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A friend of mine just bought a baritone Uke. He wants me to teach him some stuff. Can a baritone be tuned to gCEA tuning? Would that require different strings?

Thanks,
Matt

Yes it would require different strings. Because normal baritone tuning (DGBE) is so much lower then gCEA tuning the strings are much thicker to support the lower tension. Tune those same strings up to gCEA and the tension is way too high on the instrument. An easy, cheap solution is use normal tenor or concert gauge strings to achieve a high G tuning. I have done that with a couple baritones and it worked well.
 
Also he could get a capo and put it on the 5th fret (?????) and use the same chord shapes as you. But, as he has a Bari, at the end of the day I would recommend that he learns standard bari tuning (DGBE) chord shapes as there are a lot of song transcriptions out there for Baritones. There is still a lot you can teach him (e.g. strumming patterns, what chords are in the songs he likes (not chord shapes), etc.
 
He could keep the same strings... use the DGBE tuning and just get songs chorded for the bari....
www.doctoruke.com has bari chorded songs along with GCEA songs.. you could both download the same song and play together. Plus if you dont know a song Dr Uke makes a recording of what hes got listed there so you can hear how it goes.. You can still help him with the chords.. Dr ukes site shows the pictures of the chords which is very helpful when your starting out..
 
Or your friend can do nothing differently. For example, show him how to play a blues progression in C. It will work on the baritone...except that he'll be playing the blues in G. However the shapes will be the same.
 
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