Deep Baritone Melody

First published July 4, 1995 on Stickwire

To: stickwire-l@netcom.com
From: stick@earthlink.net (Stick Enterprises, Inc.)
Subject: "Deep Baritone" Melody

I have a "deep" thought, slow reading recommended. Try detuning your melody strings by a whole tone to separate your hands two frets further apart. You can do this on any of the 10 or 12-string "Stick" tunings. Tension, action and intonation will be off a bit, but it's an easy experiment.

Or else you could try tuning your bass strings higher by a whole tone - same relationship of hands, your index fingers will be separated by two extra frets. The "Full Baritone" tuning has this relationship of bass to melody strings, the 6th, lowest bass note being an open D instead of C. With the first, highest melody note also at D, all letter named notes match between the two string groups at any given fret.

Very few of you have the full Baritone tuning, but if you tuned all of its ten strings down a whole step, you'd be back to standard bass tuning with the melody down a 5th from standard tuning (instead of down a 4th as on the "Baritone Melody" tuning). I've named this the "Deep Baritone Melody" tuning.

If this experiment should happen to work for you, and you have a Stick with adjustable bridge and truss, you could commit to this tuning by making the necessary adjustments of Slide Block intonation, truss tension and individual pickup volumes. The obvious advantages are thicker strings, louder output, more punch, rhythm and drive to your melody lines, and more "character" from the round wound timbres - like a stronger Baritone Melody Stick.

The biggest advantage however is in the music you can play, and the discovery of a new "scale position 1" where the hands are closest together, index fingers spaced three frets apart (still no problem with flying fingers colliding here). I've always found that the best scale positions for "Stick" tunings put the index fingers either three, five or seven frets apart, respectively a minor 3rd, a 4th or a 5th interval apart along the board. I have taught these in the past as "scale positions 1, 2 and 3", each generating its own "color" of fingering convenience, more sharp or more flat, more major and "Lydian" or more minor and blues.

The familiar melodies and themes you play will be two frets higher. Or else you could change key and play your left hand bass and chords two frets lower. And for improvisations and new songs, the new scale position 1 is a "find". It is by nature root and 5th oriented, the lower melody strings matching key notes of the three lowest bass strings three frets removed. This is ideal for thematic construction. You can build right hand foundations in close proximity to your left-hand bass, then move up to higher scale positions on the board where fuller, close-interval melody lines are easier and more familiar to the fingers.

Besides the low melodic "root-5-octaves" that you get from this new scale position, there is something more - a well defined and physicially intuitive sense of major and minor modes. It's "do re mi" with your first finger on "do", no matter which of the three low bass strings your left hand plays as a root. More of the scale is spread out in the hand for major scales (across five fret spaces instead of the more familiar four), but this is well worth adapting to. Also, the minor and pentatonically derived blues scales are right there at scale position 1, three frets from the left hand, with no interference of hands.

I have been gravitating toward this tuning, especially in improvisation, but also for many of my newer songs, arrangements and compositions wherever the first scale position offers structural advantages. I started along this road with the 10-string "Full Baritone" tuning a few years ago, the bass side being raised a whole tone and the melody side (down a 4th) having four out of five notes in common with the standard melody tuning. I continued this concept with my Grand 7+5 with Baritone Bass.

Now I'm playing a Grand 6+6 with the standard "low C" bass again, and with the melody down a whole tone. The 1st, highest melody string is now an open (or 12th fret) C. So is the 7th, lowest bass string. At any fret space all strings in each string group perfectly match in sequence of letter named notes.

And of course all but one of the strings will match across groups when your hands are spaced a 4th interval apart along the board, as for example when your left index finger plays at an inlay dot while your right index finger plays at the next higher dot.

When you transpose or retune by a whole tone up or down, you're still in the "neighborhood" harmonically. The closest neighbor notes are 4ths (or reciprocally 5ths) apart, because of the harmonics and resultant scales they generate when acting as fundamentals. These scales differ by one sharp or one flat note, all other scale notes being commonly held by these two related fundamental notes.

A major 2nd is the next nearest related tone. As in my new Stick brochure, "A shift by a major 2nd interval corresponds to moving two perfect 4ths in the opposite direction of pitch, or two perfect 5ths in the same direction, hence any tuning alterations by 4ths, 5ths or major 2nds will maintain the close harmonic relationship between bass and melody string groups."

We have all necessary string gauges and can make up Deep Baritone Melody string sets or other melody sets detuned by a whole tone as an alternative to any existing 10-string or Grand tuning. These are available in the regular light gauge as well as medium-heavy gauge.

Besides myself and those players using the 10 or 12-string Full Baritone bass tuning (at lowest D), the only other players I know of who use a form of Deep Baritone Melody are Ian Varriale of Berkeley CA on his 10-string Stick with heavy gauges starting with a high C in the melody and a low C in the bass, and Finbar Ohanlon of Australia (as his post of yesterday reveals) on his 7+5 Grand Stick. In his post Finbar lists the Cs as highest melody and lowest bass strings, followed by matching Gs, Ds, As and Es. At that point he runs out of matching notes because of the unequal 7+5 string groupings, but the principles still apply and the musical opportunities are all there.

I for one will look forward to hear other players' impressions and reactions to this Deep Thought.

All the Best, Emmett