G'day JVC,

Your 8-stringer sounds interesting, but the thread seems to have gravitated back to tenor (4-string) guitars. How did you tune your 8-stringer ... part unison part octaves - or all in octaves?

Back in ~1965 my brother and I rather liked the idea of a 12-string guitar but no one sold any such thing in Australia - back then. As a sort of practice for following Pete Seeger's instructions for converting a 6-stringer to 12 strings I got a small 6-stringer (pretty poor quality ... screen-printed cowboys on the front, &c.) stripped it back, lightened the weight of the table and plugged the holes and slots fromn the 6 horizontal machine heads, then fitted 8 vertical machine heads.

After re slotting the bridge and nut for 8 pairs of strings I set it up all in octaves (tenor tuning plus octave below). The lowest string was to low for the body size and I ended up with the second string an octave above ... a sort of 8-string, baritone ukulele! Eventually It sounded ... well, interesting ... not bad in bluesy sort of tunes. Unfortunately, it went missing somewhere between Tasmania and the Snowy Mountains.

However, what this leads up to is the fact that I see (here in Australia) a lot of Irish groups playing what is called (in gloriously Irish fashion) an "Irish Bouzouki": 8 strings in unison pairs and with a flat-back pear shap body (like a large European mandolin) or a mid-size guitar body. This all reminds me that when I showed my 1965 effort to the local Greek-Cypriot shopkeeper, he said "That's not a guitar - that's a bouzouki., so perhaps there is a tradition for that body shape!

I don't know if the guitar-bodied "Irish Bouzouki" is common in America, but it must be around in the right (Celtic?) circles.Those I have seen here in Aussie have been hand-made to spec for various muusicians. There would be no reason not to re-string one of these to suit whatever music you like.

Regards,

Bob Bolton