Hey Everyone,

I'm new to the site and just wanted to say Hi! Hopefully I'll be getting an altoguitar from Neris in the next few months.


That being said, I know a lot of tunings are relative to what you're playing. Neris has two guitars available at the moment. One tuned in your standard 11 string tuning, and the other tuned in 4ths.

I guess I just wanted to see what everyone thought I should purchase if I want to play Baroque/Renaissance music? These guitars are both with multi scale fanned frets so I think having an opinion from all ya'll would effect my decision, since I'm an altoguitar novice.

The two options that I'm looking at from Mr. Gonzalex are below. The guitar tuned in 4ths has a larger difference in scale length.

Here are the two, I was having trouble with the images in the original post.

They're both gorgeous, I'm just having trouble deciding on which one.

Hi Dave,

Very welcome to this site! I hope that you will find many good contacts, stimulating discussions, and many useful things here.

I am not sure which alto guitar would suit you best. Myself I have two 11 string alto guitars tuned in the usual way, only with the difference that the third string of one of them is tuned half a note higher (guitar tuning). I use my alto guitars for many types of music, but mostly for renaissance and baroque music. Other members of this site will certainly give you more information on this matter that you can use while making your choice.

Did you know that you can find a lot of sheet music here? For instance, the entire book Altgitarren is here, and you can get it following this link: http://altoguitar.com/index.php?option=com_fireboard&Itemid=31&func=view&id=1626&catid=16
Then follow ninjasan's link in the third post of the thread.

Best regards, and good luck in choosing your alto guitar!

Sten

Dave,

I join Sten in welcoming you to the alto guitar forum.

I have the impression, that many people are interested in altos, but relatively few of them take the plunge and acquire one. So congratulation to your decision to buy an alto.

I have no experience with multi scale fanned frets, but I suppose that an instrument is the more difficult to play the more the angle between a fret and the right edge of the finger board exceeds the right angle and the greater the variation of this angle over the whole finger board is. So I would tend to choose the second instrument, provided it has standard tuning (g1 d1 a f c G F Eb D C B1b).

Anyhow, I would really recommend consider acquiring a thirteen string alto, if you have a chance to get one.

Playing Baroque music on alto guitars, the availability of the 12th string offers so many more options for good arranging keys, that I cannot imagine going without it. The 13th string is of secondary importance. But, as far as I know, luthiers have not yet made friends with 12 string alto guitars. So you can't get the one without the other. I guess that playing 12 strings is not much more difficult than playing 11 strings.

A common method for arranging Baroque lute music on an alto is to transpose the scores 3 semitones down (provided that the resulting key is a convenient alto key). Applying this method, you will get problems of bass range for more than 80% of the Weiss suites in the Dresden and London manuscripts, if you are restricted to 11 strings.

Thank you so much! I am taking a look over the sheet music as we speak, and it looks amazing. I can't wait to get to play it.

Silvanig,

Thannk you very much for your advice as I am a newbie to altoguitar. I think I'm going to still be acquiring an 11 to put out my feelers for these instruments. I've been wanting a multi scale neck for a long time and I finally have the chance to get one.

I had a bit of trouble going from 6 to 7 strings a few years ago, so even the 11 may be a total crapshoot.

Thanks!