Blytheryn
Musical Adam West
Slipknot play in Drop A on 25.5. You don’t need an ERG for that.Apologies if this is covered ground but I thought some of you guys might be interested.
I started my new band around a year ago and we decided we wanted to play as downtuned as possible while retaining as much melodic information as possible in the lower registers. We settled on drop A, so AEADF#B. The first extended range guitar I got was an Ormsby Hype GTR7, initially in AEADGBE but eventually I changed it to EBEADF#B with a low 80. I also got an Ibanez RGIF7 as a backup. I later added an Ormsby GTR6 in drop A as above. Meanwhile my other guitar player got An Ormsby Futura 7 (which he hated) and both Chapman Rabea signatures.
I quickly however found myself frustrated with the limited selection of available baritone and multiscale guitars, and I had always had in the back of my mind that originally 7-strings were all Fender scale and worked fine. So I got myself a cheap Ibanez RG721 and stuck on a set of slinky baritones... And it totally worked. I mean it needed a setup but it was a good as a baritone. Meanwhile we played a couple of shows and in the photos the baritones made me look like a tiny person.
Since then I've experimented with baritone slinkys in drop A on other standard guitars including a Fender 50s tele, a Duesenberg Outlaw and an Epiphone Brent Hinds V and they all work. I have now sold all of my non standard scale guitars, and now my only condiseration when buying a new guitar is whether I can get a .072 string into it.
So while I totally get why people play baritones for low tunings, my experience is that you don't NEED them, at least not for as low as drop A.
What do you guys think?