5-string Guitars
I recently discovered the strange world of guitars that are deliberately missing the 6th string. It’s a very niche subject, but grabbed my attention quite strongly. In the unlikely case this might interest you, too, I’m sharing what I found.
As a classically trained pianist, learning the guitar is an uphill battle for me. I know which harmonies and melodies I want to play, but I’m incapable of doing it with a stringed instrument. There’s many chord shapes to learn, many of which aren’t really movable from key to key. More importantly, playing the guitar requires a kind of dexterity of the hand that the piano does not train. It requires calluses and muscle build in the fingers that can only be built up with diligent practice. That didn’t really come easy to me, especially that I travel semi-frequently for conferences and therefore it’s hard to build a habit. So I pretty much gave up on the idea after a 2020 burst of initial excitement.
Until now.
Collier tuning
Two of my closest friends recently got really excited by Strandberg guitars. They’re easier to travel with as they’re smaller, they’re easier to play on as they’re very light and keep tuning very well. They also sound surprisingly great. I started browsing their website and I quickly stumbled upon a Boden JC 5 Djesse Limited Edition guitar, pictured below. 5 strings? What is going on?
I haven’t really followed Jacob Collier very closely, but I basically knew he’s a very talented musician, master of harmony. I checked out some YouTube videos on the guitar and its history. Long story short, the guitar is set up in a custom tuning: DAEAD. Supposedly, it’s a tuning that’s easier to play for somebody with pre-existing harmony training. And the 5 strings spread over a regular neck width allow for easier chord fretting and more dramatic bending. In fact, it’s not even the first 5-string guitar Jacob convinced somebody to mass produce. Turns out there’s a Jacob Collier Signature 5-String Taylor acoustic. In the videos about those guitars Jacob makes a convincing case for how inviting the tuning is for him. He stresses how his piano skills transfer better to that setup.
OK, I’m intrigued. A lot.
But there’s a few problems. First, the Strandberg above is 3500 EUR, which is very expensive for an experimental tuning and string setup. Second, it’s not even on the market yet, there’s a waitlist. Finally, and most importantly, I really don’t like the colors on it. It doesn’t look like a yellow Lamborghini, more like a Fisher-Price toy. At least in the pictures, I can’t really check it out anywhere in person.
So I started looking if that’s the only 5-string guitar being offered.
(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
I could only find one other manufacturer of electric 5-string guitars: CreamT in the UK. Funnily enough, the first one I found was also yellow. But I quickly found a “burnt caramel” one that I find quite beautiful, indeed.
It turns out the “Newman” in the brand name comes from Ted Newman Jones, a luthier and technician working with the Rolling Stones since the early ‘70s. Ted died of lung cancer in 2016, but before that happened, he had all 5-string designs digitized and now they’re produced in small batches by CreamT in Ormskirk, England.
The question then was: why would Keith Richards want a 5-string guitar? It turns out he was always removing the 6th string (low E in standard tuning) from his guitars and tuning them to an “open G” tuning. This makes it trivial to play major chords as all you have to do is to fret all strings in the same spot. It also makes it pretty easy to switch to the respective inverted IV chord, which the Rolling Stones do a lot. It’s even called “doing the Keith” by the fans. This explains so much, so quickly, about the music of the band!
That 5-string Newman is still pretty light at 2.7kg, although that’s heavier than the Strandberg (those clock at 2.2 - 2.3kg). It also has a really narrow neck to keep the string distances the same as a regular guitar. It’s also very expensive, around the same price as the Strandberg.
Wait a minute, I already have a guitar with regular string distances! I could do what Keith Richards did before getting a custom guitar: remove the 6th string.
Modding the Revstar
My 2020 Yamaha Revstar RS620 in “snake eyes green” is a thing of beauty. I love the shape that sits somewhere between a Les Paul and a Strat. I love the color, the satin finish, the “Superflighter” pearl inlays, and the minimal hardware look on the body that’s achieved with the wraparound bridge and only two knobs. Sure, it weighs almost 4 kilograms and the neck is quite thick, but I can live with that.
With a few false starts, I managed to set up the guitar with 5 strings, skipping the 6th, like Keith Richards. But I went with the Collier tuning. Low D on the 5th string, 52 gauge like the grunge bands of yore. Then up A (42), E (32), A (13), D (10). The lack of the 6th string required some adjustment of the bridge. I also had to unscrew the humbucker coils a little on the bassier strings to keep the levels of each string consistent. But it was a relatively painless mod.
DAEAD tuning in practice
I only spent a week with the tuning so far and I’m no expert in terms of guitar performance. But maybe that’s the point. The tuning is indeed a revelation in terms of how easy it is to just instantly know where to put your hand to make which chord happen. You mostly operate the middle string to change the chord from the “default” sus2/add9 to a minor, major, sus4, etc. The chord inversions are also quite obvious to me. Some would definitely be easier to fret if the strings were wider apart, so I do think Collier is onto something.
The flip side is that everything you play now is a barre chord. So, I definitely need to get that dexterity and strength in to play consistently. But let me tell you: it’s easier to barre five strings than six. I’m hooked to get better at it.
Depending on a non-standard tuning
A friend who is awesome at guitar shared his concern with me that learning a specific non-standard tuning, especially one using a strange number of strings, will essentially limit me to my particular weird guitar.
He’s not wrong. One thing to mention is that this tuning is not great if your goal is to repeat well-known riffs, solos, and harmonies to a tee. No popular music I’m aware of was made with this tuning, so it’s very likely some notes will be surprisingly hard to play. That’s not my goal with this, though. I want to be able to play melodies and harmonies of my own. And I already tested that this particular combination leads to much quicker results. See here for a tune I recorded just a few days into using this setup.
It’s true that depending on this particular niche tuning will not translate to playing on other instruments that might be available at concerts (if my own guitar failed, for instance), or while camping, and so on. However, even if you forget 5-string DAEAD guitars, there’s a lot of guitarists tuning their instruments in a different way. Robert Fripp advertises a “new standard tuning” that’s almost “all fifths”. Indeed, some people just go for all fifths with a custom 1st string. Stanley Jordan plays with two-handed tapping and tunes his guitar in all fourths. Drop tunings are popular in heavier music. Open tunings like DADGAD are popular in singer-songwriter circles.
People depending on those already have to rely on specially prepared instruments. And I’m not even mentioning 7-string and even 8-string variants that are increasingly popular these days. It’s really okay to learn the instrument using any tuning that will work for you. I guess I’m trying to convince myself here a little, too. It’s definitely a time investment, you don’t want to waste the effort. But as a pianist, I already see that the learning curve with DAEAD is much flatter.
Will report later how the learning goes!