www.BaritoneCittern.Info
It's been almost 20 years now since I fell in love with the sound of the cittern (some call it a 5-course bouzouki) after hearing Gerald Trimble perform at the Lawrence Arts Center with the late Johnny Cunningham on fiddle. Even though Johnny was one of the greatest of all Scottish fiddlers, it was Gerald's cittern that captured my heart. Not only can Gerald be credited with introducing the cittern to the modern stage, but his command of the instrument set a standard that, in my mind, is unmatched to this day.
As a guitarist, I REALLY wanted a cittern. Since they were basically hand-made by special order in those days, I did the next best thing and attempted to convert a 12-string guitar into a 10-string cittern. As is explained in detail below, it didn't work very well. However, by continuing to modify the design I ended up with a new instrument that is similar to a lower-tuned cittern. I called it a 10-string guitar until someone pointed out that this is the name of a specific instrument that has been around for hundreds of years, so now I call it a Baritone Cittern.
Enjoy! - Larry Carter - www.LCarter.Com
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Converting 12-string Guitar to a Baritone Cittern
There are two accounts regarding this conversion. The first is a true story I perform in bardic fashion that includes the first tune I wrote on Baritone Cittern, "The Bat in the Meadow." The story recalls how my 12-string guitar seemed much happier after I altered it's gender by surgically removing two of it's strings, and how the new instrument was promptly blessed by a strange occurance involving a bat. Really! I'm currently recording a solo Baritone Cittern album that will include this serendipitous encounter, so check back for a download. What follows is the second version of the conversion - the nuts & bolts details for those of you who possess an extra 12-string guitar (I'll bet you're not playing it much anyway, right?), a fondness for the sound of a cittern/bouzouki, and an experimental spirit. I love the "Craviola" design Giannini came up with for their guitars with their asymmetrical bodies and trapezoid inlays, so I decided to start with it as my experimental 12-string. Other guitar makers have replicated the Craviola design to produce better guitars than Giannini, so when all-round-music-guy Alonzo Beardshear offered to sell me a Craviola designed Westbury guitar (which, perhaps not all that strangely, was constructed in the Giannini factory) I knew I was on the right track. However, any 12-string can be modified to become a Baritone Cittern. Unless you are handy with guitar repairs, however, you'll probably want to leave the actual operation to a qualified luthier. |
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My first thought was that I could just rebuild the bridge and nut (the top bridge) for 10 strings instead of 12, then tune it like a cittern only lower. Unfortunately, the lowest double strings were so long that they rattled together and sounded awful. I then removed one of the low strings, which worked fine but the 9 strings left the instrument feeling unbalanced. That's when I got the idea of adding a 6th note LOW string for the tonic. That sounded better, but the pitch range from lowest string to highest string was now so wide that the top strings kept breaking. So, for the final step I exchanged the low string for an extra thick one (D'Addario makes a 70 that works just fine) and tuned everything down to the open-tuning of low A (A - D - A - E - A - E , low to top) and used a capo to get it back up to C, D or E. What I ended up with, then, is a 10-string instrument with six notes rather five like on normal citterns.
If you have an extra 12-string guitar sitting around that you don't play anyway (hey, it can happen) and you want to experiment, I welcome you to contact me for details. It will require custom-ordered strings, but I think it's worth it.
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since January 25th, 2005 | 
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