Standard tenor tuning is C-G-D-A from the bottom up: in fifths, like the tenor banjo and the mandola. You can use them in any genre - blues, rock and country have all seen their share of tenor guitar players. It’s sometimes used as a crossover instrument for mandolin players looking to get into the guitar, and often appreciated in its own right for its unique sound. However, the tenor guitar’s popularity has seen a resurgence in the last decade. For a long time they were heard primarily in Celtic folk music, where the open tunings were a natural fit for playing reels and jigs. Tenor guitars gradually faded into obscurity as electric guitars came to prominence and the number of tenor banjo players diminished. Instrument manufacturers tried a few things, such as putting wooden heads on banjos, before players coalesced around the idea of putting a banjo neck on a guitar body. However, banjo players also wanted to create less harsh sounds with more sustain. They were the loudest stringed instruments around, so they were used in the rhythm sections of early jazz bands to provide chords that could be heard over the horns and to play the occasional solo. It may be hard to believe now, but the tenor banjo was the most popular stringed instrument in the US between World War I and the early 1930s. The tenor guitar evolved out of the tenor banjo rather than the guitar. You could double the strings like a 12-string guitar, but technically you’d be making an octave mandolin or mandocello. They come as flat-tops, archtops, resonators, solidbodies and semi-hollows. Tenor guitars come in almost as many varieties as their 6-string counterparts, though historically there have been more acoustic tenors than electrics. It has four strings and a scale around 23”. I thought I’d introduce an instrument that goes in the opposite direction: the tenor guitar.Ī tenor guitar has the body of a guitar married to the neck of a tenor banjo. I know folks around here are into guitars with more than 6 strings.
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