Hi - just found Mudcat and JVZ's original posting on this thread struck a harmonic. I see some of the posters are still active on the forum but JVZ seems to have dropped out.
Like JVZ I sporadically struggled in vain with, and in and around, six-string stuff for decades.
Before coming back to four, five, eight and 10-string instruments.
The mandolins were a start and I accumulated a few, including a brilliant 1920-odd German banjolin, but again I found fat fingers a large frustration and the high pitch meant I would need pain and suffering for my gravelpit vocals to qualify as company.
Baritone uke tuned GDAE an octave down from mando was the break-through. Within a month I had every - excepting B - major, minor and 7th on my side and I could finally play along with some of my favoured songs - ballads and Blues. B7 is ok.
I transposed Gary Turner and Brenton White's "Progressive Rhythym Guitar" to GDAE and CGDAE - as much as I could make work anyway - and had a ball.
Perhaps I should have left the 19.5 inch scale, four-string baritones with nylon but I didn't and between things like tension and lowering actions I had them playing 2/3 of a fret distance sharp inside six months. Took the bridges off, added trapeze tails, said "what the hell", gave them four-a-side tuners, four more strings, new nuts - in more ways than one - and compensated floating bridges. Magic in octave Gs, Ds and paired As and Es.
A pair of inexpensive 23-inch "student guitars" copped the same treatment and the magic grew. A 19-inch Chinese six-string was re-tailed, re-bridged, re-nutted etc and became my first five-string CGDAE. Within a fortnight it had gained full puberty with ten strings. Tuning knobs are tiny but ......
The ukes then got nuked to octave on all four courses. I figured if the two ends decided to look too closely at each other by craning the neck I would either get a bit of warning by the intonation going sharp or hear the bang. Neither has so far happened and the chorus is spritely fantastic. If it does happen I reckon I like them enough to pull 'em apart, straighten them and give 'em truss rods - they're family.
The tale continued with 25.5" acoustics done the same way as eights and tens and I reckon there is an incremental improve in the sound at finger-picking, especially, over the shorter scales but the left-hand finger fatique factor is up.
Between things a no-name Les Paul electric became an eight, as did an Ovation copy acoustic-electic, and a Road Star copy became a five. A deal of work with new-build LP tail and bridge and the vibrato bridge on the Road Star - and a fair bit of ho-hum winding the new LP and Roadie pickups but what the hell.
The LP sounds (to me) as good as my big-name 12-string and I reckon the Roadie will foot it with any Strat.
I guess the relative paucity of tab for (C)GDAE could be seen as a disadvantage but the chord progressions to pretty much every tune are readily available and I reckon working with and around them is where individuality thrives.
I just wanted to make music and (C)GDAE tuning on inexpensive instruments granted me that favour.