Tiny baritone (tenor with linear baritone tuning)

As I've been playing uke more and more I've been slowly moving to baritone and away from tenor. I'll probably be selling most of my tenors soon.

Today I had a crazy idea to put baritone re-entrant tuning on my LFDM tenor. I ended up putting linear baritone tuning on there and I'm astounded at how good it feels and sounds. This is using the same strings I am currently using on a Pono Pro Classic baritone:

2nd and 3rd strings of Oasis GPX Carbon classical guitar strings
Thomastik-Infeld CF30
Thomastik-Infeld CF35

Although the scale is 3" shorter it still works very well. Yes the bottom string is a little noisy if you try to play very fast single notes on it especially on the first couple of frets and yes if you play chords right up past fret 14 it gets a little tight since the available vibrating length is short, but for the most part it works very well. I was really impressed how well the low D speaks on the instrument.

Several members use DGBE & dGBE tuning on their tenors.

(It gives a different tension to the strings as a bonus.)

Good to know. I had not heard of anyone doing DGBE and just assumed dGBE was the only practical thing given the small body of the tenor. I'm pretty happy with it so far and I'm tempted to keep it like that.

2xbass said:

Good to know. I had not heard of anyone doing DGBE and just assumed dGBE was the only practical thing given the small body of the tenor. I'm pretty happy with it so far and I'm tempted to keep it like that.

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Thanks.........now I have a reason to buy another LfdM tenor

I tried dGBE on my Barron River (cypress) and on the ukuMele (acacia) tenors, using the Aquila and Living Water sets. On these ukes and with these strings, it sounded awful. They sounded shockingly dull. But as always, it's just a matter of finding the right strings for a given instrument.

I used Living Water Low G Concert strings on my tenors when I was using DGBE as an experiment, I liked the tension they gave, & the tone.

(I also down tuned Aquila with a Red low G tenor strings, but didn't find that so good.)

GHS makes a dGBE set of strings for tenor ukulele. This strings are available on Craig Chee and Sarah Maisel's website (Craig strings one of his tenor ukes dGBE).

http://www.cheemaisel.com/signature-strings/ghs-signature-string-sets

To make this work with linear tuning I think it's a matter of having both a uke with decent CLEAR low end response and the right strings. Dave, it's interesting for example that your 19" Kamaka sounded muddy in this tuning and better in Bb but yet one of Luis' ukes handles it so well. I'm willing to bet your Macassar/Cedar Pono Pro Classic would totally work for this tuning.

I have been tuning Tenors to dGBE and had not thought about low D. I use D'Addario Carbons on one, just standard Tenor hi g stings and they work out really well on my Caramel. I bet the Low G strings would work for low D as well? I have a low G set in reserve, I may try that.

2xbass said:

To make this work with linear tuning I think it's a matter of having both a uke with decent CLEAR low end response and the right strings. Dave, it's interesting for example that your 19" Kamaka sounded muddy in this tuning and better in Bb but yet one of Luis' ukes handles it so well. I'm willing to bet your Macassar/Cedar Pono Pro Classic would totally work for this tuning.

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It was the 19" Kinnard mahogany baritone that sounded dull to me tuned DGBE but that had more to do with the strings used and MY sound preference for a baritone being as bright as possible on the treble side. The strings I pulled off the Kinnard were #1 = .026" and #2 = .032" florocarbon. With mahogany being warm and mellow these fat floros will just make it more mellow. I prefer Martin floro from the baritone set as they measure at .021" and .025", these are nice and bright even tuned DGBE.

Back to your topic, I understand what you have done with the Oasis GPX classical guitar strings. The diameters being large at. 027" & .034" for your #1 & #2 spots will give ample tension on a short scale length for DGBE tuning.

Nice job on the experimenting and I really appreciate you sharing this with us. I believe you are correct about my Pono being a good candidate for this experiment. The LfdMs are certainly up to the task, you should share this with Luis as I know he would find it interesting.

We have a tenor set up like that. Craig Chee gave us the idea last year during TBUG, and we got the strings from he and Sarah. The uke sounds wonderful!