Ten-string guitar
Encyclopedia
Guitar
The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
, including:
- Both electric and acoustic guitars.
- Instruments used principally for classical, folk and popular music.
- Both coursedCourse (music)A course is a pair or more of adjacent strings tuned to unison or an octave and usually played together as if a single string. It may also refer to a single string normally played on its own on an instrument with other multi-string courses, for example the bass string on a nine string baroque...
and uncoursed instruments.
Ten-stringed harp guitars
The oldest ten-string guitars are harp guitars, guitars to which extra strings have been added which are never fretted but may be plucked or strummed. These strings are therefore played in a manner somewhat similar to those of the harpHarp
The harp is a multi-stringed instrument which has the plane of its strings positioned perpendicularly to the soundboard. Organologically, it is in the general category of chordophones and has its own sub category . All harps have a neck, resonator and strings...
, while those of the principal neck are played as a guitar
Guitar
The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
, hence the name.
Often but not always, a second neck, parallel to the fretboard, carries these extra strings. There have been many designs of harp guitar, but in the nineteenth century ten-string versions were particularly popular.
Information on nineteenth-century harp guitars comes from three main primary sources:
- Surviving instruments (and in some cases, copies of instruments) in museums and private collections.
- Surviving music, tablature and in at least one case a complete student method for the instrument.
- Paintings and drawings in which the instrument is visible. These must of course be treated with some suspicion, as the artist may not have considered the details of the instrument important, and in the case of portraits may have completed these details from memory rather than at sittings.
Décacorde
In the early 19th century Ferdinando CarulliFerdinando Carulli
Ferdinando Maria Meinrado Francesco Pascale Rosario Carulli was an Italian composer for classical guitar and the author of the first complete classical guitar method, which continues to be used today. He wrote a variety of works for classical guitar, including concertos and chamber works...
and René Lacôte developed a harp guitar they called the Décacorde (French for ten-string).
Carulli played this type of guitar and wrote a method for it titled Méthode Complète pour le Décacorde. In it he describes the tuning as C-D-E-F-G-A-d-g-b-e' (strings 10 to 1), with the upper five strings A-d-g-b-e' fretted and the lower basses C-D-E-F-G not fretted.
Carulli also wrote divertissement
Divertissement
Divertissement is used, in a similar sense to the Italian 'divertimento', for a light piece of music for a small group of players, however the French term has additional meanings....
s for this instrument.
Two Décacordes by Lacôte are housed in the Music Museum of the Cité de la Musique in Paris:
- One circa 1826, with five fretted and five unfretted strings.
- One circa 1830, with six fretted and four unfretted strings.
There is also a Décacorde (attributed to Lacôte), that was in the workshop of Françoise Sinier de Ridder, which has 7 strings on the neck (fretted) and 3 sub-basses (unfretted strings).
Other romantic harp guitars
Period harp guitars built by Johann Gottfried Scherzer survive. A copy of one of these, based on an original circa 1862, has six fretted and four unfretted strings.Johann Kaspar Mertz
Johann Kaspar Mertz
Johann Kaspar Mertz was a Hungarian guitarist and composer.NOTE: THE ORIGINAL CREATOR OF THIS PAGE PLAGIARIZED THEIR MATERIAL. It has been copied and pasted from the Mel Bay website: http://www.melbay.com/authors.asp?author=749 I tried to report this problem to wikipedia, but they do not make it...
is known to have played ten-string harp guitars.
Based on surviving instruments and urtexts
Urtext edition
An urtext edition of a work of classical music is a printed version intended to reproduce the original intention of the composer as exactly as possible, without any added or changed material...
of music written for it, the tuning was AI-BI-C-D-E-A-d-g-b-e'.
Yepes' ten-string guitar
The extended-range classical guitar is a classical guitarClassical guitar
The classical guitar is a 6-stringed plucked string instrument from the family of instruments called chordophones...
with additional strings, normally extra bass strings past the bass E string, that are available on the fingerboard.
Many configurations have been produced, but the ten-string classical guitar received a particular boost in 1964, when Narciso Yepes
Narciso Yepes
Narciso Yepes was a Spanish guitarist.-Biography:Yepes was born into a family of humble origin in Lorca, Region of Murcia. His father gave him his first guitar when he was four years old. He took his first lessons from Jesus Guevara, in Lorca...
performed the Concierto de Aranjuez
Concierto de Aranjuez
The Concierto de Aranjuez is a composition for classical guitar and orchestra by the Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo. Written in 1939, it is probably Rodrigo's best-known work, and its success established his reputation as one of the most significant Spanish composers of the twentieth century. ...
with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, using a ten-string guitar invented by Yepes in collaboration with José Ramírez III
José Ramírez III
José Ramírez III was a luthier and the grandson of José Ramírez, founder of Ramírez Guitars. He was responsible for major changes both to the company and to the classical guitars it produces....
, with a specific tuning designed to supply sympathetic string resonance to all twelve notes of the chromatic scale
Chromatic scale
The chromatic scale is a musical scale with twelve pitches, each a semitone apart. On a modern piano or other equal-tempered instrument, all the half steps are the same size...
, in unison with any note played on the treble strings. This was significant for two reasons:
- The endorsement of an artist of Yepes' calibre drew attention to the instrument, and demonstrated its capabilities. Starting in 1963, and for the rest of his life, Yepes used only the ten-string guitar in recording and performance.
- The availability of high-quality ten-string classical guitars from the Ramírez Company allowed and encouraged other performers to investigate the instrument.
The use of the ten-string classical guitar is similar to that of the harp guitar:
- Six-string guitar music can be played on the first six strings, but with added resonance from the extra strings. This was Yepes' original intention and the reason for the design.
- Music specifically arranged for the instrument can make use of the extra strings directly, thus:
- Music originally written for instruments with more than six strings can be more faithfully transcribed. Music written by BachBạchBạch is a Vietnamese surname. The name is transliterated as Bai in Chinese and Baek, in Korean.Bach is the anglicized variation of the surname Bạch.-Notable people with the surname Bạch:* Bạch Liêu...
and his contemporaries for luteLuteLute can refer generally to any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back, or more specifically to an instrument from the family of European lutes....
is of particular interest in this regard. The bass strings can be appropriately tuned. - New music specifically written for the ten-string guitar can make use of the extra strings however the composer might wish.
- Music originally written for instruments with more than six strings can be more faithfully transcribed. Music written by Bach
Unlike the harp guitar, the extended-range classical guitar has a single neck and allows all strings to be fretted.
While the six-string classical guitar remains the standard and most common instrument, since 1963 ten-string guitars in similar configuration to the original Ramírez have been adopted by many classical guitarists and produced by several first-class luthiers, using both Yepes' original tuning and others.
Halo Custom Guitars: XSI
The Halo Guitars XSI is a solid bodySolid body
A solid-body instrument is a string instrument such as a guitar, bass or violin built without its normal sound box and relying on an electric pickup system to directly receive the vibrations of the strings....
ten-string guitar with ten individual steel strings, two EMG
EMG, Inc.
EMG, Inc. is the current legal name of a company based in Santa Rosa, California which manufactures guitar pickups and EQ accessories. Founded in 1976, the company was originally called Dirtywork Studios. The name was changed to "Overlend" in 1978 and then to the current name in 1983...
ten-string pickups, and a Kahler
Kahler
Kahler may refer to:Places*Kahler, Luxembourg, a small town in the commune of Garnich*Kahler Asten,a German mountain rangePeople*Art Kahler , American football and basketball player and coach...
ten-string tremolo bridge. XSI is an acronym for Extended Scale Instrument. Halo Guitars tunes the XSI from low to high as follows: A+D+G+C+F-Bb-Eb-Ab-C-F.
Gadotti Guitars 10 String Nylon King Electric
In January, 2009, Gadotti Guitars announced the 10 String Nylon King Electric, a solid body, nylon-stringed ten-string guitar, suitable for both Yepes and other tunings such as the Baroque.Ten-string jazz guitar
A ten-string jazz guitarJazz guitar
The term jazz guitar may refer to either a type of guitar or to the variety of guitar playing styles used in the various genres which are commonly termed "jazz"...
by Mike Shishkov, based on the ten-string extended-range classical guitar, was demonstrated at the 3rd International Ten String Guitar Festival in October, 2008.
Hawaiian guitar
Hawaiian guitars are electric lap steel and table steel guitars with six, eight or ten strings per neck, and one or two necks. The ten-string single-neck instrument is one of the standard configurations, not one of the most common but not unusual either.Pedal steel guitar
Most pedal steel guitars have either one or two ten-string necks. Some but by no means all advanced players use necks with more than ten strings, but ten strings is the normal minimum.- The most common single-neck configuration is a ten-string neck with an E9 tuningE9 tuningE9 tuning is a common tuning for steel guitar necks of more than six strings. In particular, it is the most common tuning for the far neck on a two-neck table steel guitar or pedal steel guitar, most often combined with C6 tuning for the near neck, and also a popular tuning for single neck...
. An instrument of this configuration is known as an S-10.
- The most common twin-neck configuration consists of two ten-string necks, the nearer tuned to a C6 tuningC6 tuningC6 tuning is the most common tuning for electric steel guitar, both on single and multiple neck instruments. On a twin-neck, the most common tuning is C6 tuning on the near neck and E9 tuning on the far neck....
and the other tuned to an E9 tuning. An instrument of this configuration is known as a D-10.
The standard student pedal steel guitar is a single-neck ten-string instrument with three pedals and from one to five knee levers, tuned to E9 tuning.
The first step up from this is a professional S-10 with three or more pedals and four or five knee levers, and the most common next step up is to a D-10 with eight pedals and five knee levers. The D-10 is the most common configuration for professional players.
Some advanced players prefer to remain on an S-10 configuration, perhaps adding more pedals and/or knee levers. Other advanced players progress from the S-10 to a single neck instrument with twelve strings, either a U-12 which uses a universal tuning
Universal tuning
In playing pedal steel guitar, a universal tuning is one for a neck of twelve or more strings which combines features of several other tunings, commonly including one or both of the standard C6 and E9 tunings...
, or an S-12 which uses an extended E-9 tuning. Single neck instruments with more than twelve strings also exist, such as the fifteen-string universal tuning U-15, and double-neck with more than ten strings per neck, notably the D-12 with two twelve-string necks and various tunings most commonly based on extended E9 and extended C6 tunings.
Professional instruments are normally custom-made to order. Even in the case of an S-10, while the first three pedals and five knee levers are fairly standard in function, there are variations to the order of these and many players add others. Advanced players of all configurations tend to design their own individual setups, known as copedent
Copedent
Copedent is a table used to describe the tuning and pedal arrangement on apedal steel guitar. The term was coined by Tom Bradshaw in an early 1970s article in Guitar Player magazine. It is short for "ChOrd PEDal arrangemENT". According to Bradshaw, the term is pronounced "co-PEE-dent"...
s, specifying the exact string tunings and gauges and the actions of the pedals and levers.
Baroque guitar
The baroque guitar is one of the earliest instruments considered a guitar, and the first to have significant surviving repertoire.Surviving baroque guitars have (or originally had) nine or ten strings, in five courses
Course (music)
A course is a pair or more of adjacent strings tuned to unison or an octave and usually played together as if a single string. It may also refer to a single string normally played on its own on an instrument with other multi-string courses, for example the bass string on a nine string baroque...
. Stradivarius
Stradivarius
The name Stradivarius is associated with violins built by members of the Stradivari family, particularly Antonio Stradivari. According to their reputation, the quality of their sound has defied attempts to explain or reproduce, though this belief is controversial...
guitars (of which two, the Hill (1688) and Rawlins (1700) survive complete, plus a neck and several other fragments) all had ten strings in five courses.
Viola guitar
The viola guitar is a guitar with ten light steel strings in five courses, played with the fingers rather than with a plectrum. It is particularly prevalent in the folk music of Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
, whre it's called "viola caipira" (hillbilly guitar), or simply "viola". The viola braguesa and viola amarantina are other types of ten-string Portuguese folk guitars, which are possibly predecessors of the Brazilian instrument.
Bich 10
B.C.Rich produce three models of solid bodySolid body
A solid-body instrument is a string instrument such as a guitar, bass or violin built without its normal sound box and relying on an electric pickup system to directly receive the vibrations of the strings....
ten-string guitar, all of them strung and tuned in the same way.
These are six-course instruments, unlike most ten-string guitars which either have ten individual strings or five two-string courses. The B.C.Rich ten-string is tuned and played similarly to a six-string, but with two-string courses
Course (music)
A course is a pair or more of adjacent strings tuned to unison or an octave and usually played together as if a single string. It may also refer to a single string normally played on its own on an instrument with other multi-string courses, for example the bass string on a nine string baroque...
in place of four of the single strings of the six-string.
This instrument was introduced as a custom order model with a new body shape known as the Rich Bich at the 1978 NAMM Show
NAMM Show
The NAMM Show is one of the largest music product trade shows in the world, founded in 1901. It is held every January in Anaheim, California, USA, at the Anaheim Convention Center...
. There were two innovative features:
- The stringing. The top E and B strings were strung as unison pairs, and the G and D strings as pairs with a principal and octave string, all in the same way as the twelve-string guitar. However the A and lower E strings were single. This was claimed to give the brightness of the twelve, while allowing higher levels of distortion before the sound became muddy.
- The positioning of the machine heads. The Bich had a conventional six-string head for tuning the principal strings, with the four extra strings tuned by machine heads positioned in the body, past the tailpieceTailpieceA tailpiece is a component on many stringed musical instruments that anchors one end of the strings, usually the end opposite the end with the tuning mechanism the scroll, headstock, peghead, etc.-Function and construction:...
. This helped determine the radical shape of the body, and countered the tendency of coursed electric guitars to be head-heavy owing to the weight of the extra machine heads.
The BC Rich "Bich" 10 string guitar was the brain-child of Neal Moser. During the late 1960s, Neal was a go-to tech for the likes of Jimi Hendrix, and Steven Stills of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Neal worked as a sub-contractor for Bernie Rico (BC Rich) from 1974 to 1985. During his time with BC Rich, he conceived, designed, and built the first Bich 10 string prototype guitar. Contrary to popular belief, the Bich guitar was never owned by BC Rich. The design was licensed to BC Rich under contract with Neal Moser. A lawsuit between Neal Moser, and HHI Holdings Inc./BC Rich was recently settled. This settlement gives Neal's company Moser Custom Guitars and HHI/BC Rich the right to produce their own version of the Bich 10 string and 6 string guitars. In 2003 BC Rich contacted Neal Moser, Sal Gonzales, and Mal Stitch to produce 25 reissue models of the original prototype Bich 10 string guitar. Due to the filing of the lawsuit, only 15 BC Rich/PMS 25th Anniversary Prototype Bich 10 string guitars would ever be crafted. The original prototype Bich 10 string is currently owned by Dan Lawrence.
The design was successful enough to be still in production as a ten-string, but many players also bought it for the body shape rather than the ten-string feature, and simply removed the extra strings. B.C.Rich recognised this by releasing six-string models of the Bich body shape.
All Bich variants are hard tail guitars with through body necks and two humbucking pickups. The ten-string models differ from each other in finish and control details
The most notable user of the "Rich Bich" 10 string guitar is Joe Perry of Aerosmith.
.
Godin Glissentar (A11)
GodinGodin
Godin is a French surname, one that is especially common in French Canada.-People with the surname Godin:* Carel Godin de Beaufort, racing driver* Christophe Godin, musician* Dave Godin* Diego Godín, Uruguayan football player* Eddy Godin...
produces a special guitar - the semi-acoustic, fretless, eleven-string guitar, called Glissentar.
On Godin's site, it is stated that the guitar was specially designed for performing Turkish traditional music.
- Unlike the other coursed multi-string guitars, the Glissentar is strung with nylon strings. The eleven strings are in six courses. The first five strings are double, tuned in unison and the 11th string is just one, tuned in E.
Guitar-like instruments with ten strings
- The vihuela de mano, an ancestor of the guitar, which had several variations including a five-course version.
- The Puerto Rican bordonuaBordonuaThe Bordonua is a large, deep body bass guitar which is native to Puerto Rico. They are made using several different shapes and sizes....
, a bass instrument most commonly having ten strings in five courses, although eight and twelve string versions also exist.
- The Puerto Rican CuatroCuatro (Puerto Rico)The cuatro is the national instrument of Puerto Rico. It belongs to the lute family of string instruments.The cuatro of Puerto Rico has ten strings in five courses, tuned from low to high B-e-a-d'-g', 54321, with B and E in octaves and A, D and G in unisons. A cuatro player is called a...
, of which there are three main types - four string, four-course and five-course.
- The North Mexican bajo quinto, which is a five-course baritone instrument used in tejanoTejano musicTejano music or Tex-Mex music is the name given to various forms of folk and popular music originating among the Mexican-American populations of Central and Southern Texas...
and norteñoNorteño (music)Norteño , also norteña or conjunto, is a genre of Mexican music. The accordion and the bajo sexto are norteño's most characteristic instruments. The norteño genre is popular in both Mexico and the United States, especially among the Mexican community...
music.
- The five-course charangoCharangoThe charango is a small Andean stringed instrument of the lute family, 66 cm long, traditionally made with the shell of the back of an armadillo. Primarily played in traditional Andean music, and is sometimes used by other Latin American musicians. Many contemporary charangos are now made with...
, a South American folk instrument which appears from the front to be a small guitar, and its larger relative the charangonCharangonThe Charangón is a small lute-like fretted stringed instrument, of the charango family.Its general shape and construction are very similar to the charango, but it is larger and is typically pitched 3 or 4 diatonic intervals lower than a standard charango.The overall length varies from 70 to 80 cm,...
. The charango's body was traditionally made from an armadilloArmadilloArmadillos are New World placental mammals, known for having a leathery armor shell. Dasypodidae is the only surviving family in the order Cingulata, part of the superorder Xenarthra along with the anteaters and sloths. The word armadillo is Spanish for "little armored one"...
shell and is these days often a wooden bowl. Both instruments are from the luteLuteLute can refer generally to any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back, or more specifically to an instrument from the family of European lutes....
family, rather than the guitar family.
- The electric Chapman StickChapman StickThe Chapman Stick is an electric musical instrument devised by Emmett Chapman in the early 1970s. A member of the guitar family, the Chapman Stick usually has ten or twelve individually tuned strings and has been used on music recordings to play bass lines, melody lines, chords or textures...
, which may have eight, ten or twelve strings.
- The name citternCitternThe cittern or cither is a stringed instrument dating from the Renaissance. Modern scholars debate its exact history, but it is generally accepted that it is descended from the Medieval Citole, or Cytole. It looks much like the modern-day flat-back mandolin and the modern Irish bouzouki and cittern...
is given to a wide range of plucked instruments, including some modern guitar derivatives with ten strings.