Apparently the 11-string guitar that Georg Bolin built is less an evolution from a Russian 7-string guitar and more an effort to produce a modern instrument with the capabilities of the Baroque lute, which has a lot in common with the Swedish lute (which was what Sven Scholander, Richard Dyer-Bennet's mentor early on, used for song accompaniment).

Cruising through cyberspace, I found the following on an early music forum. Judging from the syntax, this appears to have been posted by someone for whom English is not the first language. I've tidied up some strange spellings, but I left the grammar as is:—

The 11-string Alto Guitar (Alt Gitarr, Altgitarren) was first designed by the Swedish luthier and acoustic researcher Georg Bolin and his friend the Swedish lutenist-guitar player Per-Olof Johnson. They developed a new instrument with a more short neck, but with the 1st to 7th strings with the same length, and the additional basses with different and more longer length. The 1st string is tuned "g" and its length stopped at what would be 3rd fret of Spanish classic guitar.

11-Strings Alto Guitar, (Alt Gitarr) Intonation, (from 1st to 11th strings):   g1-d1-a-f-c-G-F-E#-D-C-B.

With this intonation you can play lute music direct from the tablature. There are other possible tunings developed by different players who tunes the additional bass strings to the key.

I wasn't aware that there was such a thing as an "alto guitar," but apparently there is. Must be pretty rare, otherwise, I would have encountered them long before now! The tuning, as far as I've been able to tell by googling, is the same as a regular guitar with a capo on the 5th fret. It would appear that small guitars such as the Tacoma Papoose for sure, and possibly other ¾ length pitch instruments like the Baby Taylor and Mini-Martin would classify as "alto" guitars.

The tuning of the Bolin 11-string, however, is the same as that of a Baroque lute (first string tuned to G above Middle C, with the major third occurring between the 3rd and 4th strings rather than the 2nd and 3rd strings, as it is on the standard guitar). As the above quote says, this means that lute music can be played on this instrument directly from the lute tablature, without having to do any transposing, re-fingering, or any other rearranging.

From time to time I've thought about getting a lute, but after trying a couple, and considering the purely mechanical (non-musical) difficulties the instrument offers, were I to go in that direction, I would trade the cool troubadour image for something a lot more practical, very much like the Bolin. Well—exactly like the Bolin. But having played the guitar for over fifty years (almost never using special tunings, not even dropped-D), I would cheat and tune the third string a half-step higher so all the fingerings would be the same as the guitar.

After all, Ronn MacFarlane of the Baltimore Consort uses nylon strings on his lute rather than the more "authentic" sheep-gut. He said that if he followed the dictates of the early music purists and used gut strings, he'd spend most of his time on stage trying to keep his lute in tune rather than just playing music. So a little modernization serves the cause of music, and that, after all, is what it's all about, n'est-ce pas?

Don Firth