Most versatile…. Scale length?

[OmegaSlayer]

I bought my baritone specifically to play cowboy chords

On topic, mine is the Warmoth 28-5/8 which i believe is supposed to be exactly two lower frets longer than a 25.5? I dont remember. Either way, I think this is the right medium point. A lot of people think 27 is going to get them oodles of extra tension, but in reality, it only gets you about a half step lower while keeping the same tension as your 25.5. And subsequently, my 28-5/8 only lets me get a full step down. It also doesnt really feel too crazy. Its definitely longer, but still fun and playable for all my usual riffs. REALLY fun.

I guess what I mean by that, is that 27 is sort of the bottom of baritone, which doesnt really give you much change. Whereas 30 is a monster, and will allow you to keep a normal set of 10s in B standard .

I said overrated, not useless

 

[0rimus]

28.625" on my Agile is my favorite, so of course I'm biased towards that.

However if I was dancing around a bunch of varied tunings and pitches I'd actually suggest a shorter ERG scale. 27-28".

On my 28.625 I'm tuned to 7 String A standard, using a specialty titanium Ernie Ball RPS blah blah 0.008 string for the high D...

And it's tenuous as fuck man. The highest I could ever possibly see that string going without snapping.

On 27" you could slap a 0.010 in 4th octave E and probably still be okay.

TL;DR
If you already know what tuning you're gonna use, buy the appropriate scale for what you wanna do.

As much disdain I feel for boring, short 27" 7 strings and baritones, it IS admittedly a perfect spot to start and experiment.

 

[Grindspine]

27 feels light to me on most 8 stringers. Meshuggah's 29.4" feels a bit much.

I settled on a Legator Ninja N8FX with a 26.5 to 28" mutli scale. It holds F# really nicely with 10-74 strings. It can hold F okay, but feels a little lax for my preference. I haven't tried thicker strings on it.

 

[OmegaSlayer]

27 feels light to me on most 8 stringers. Meshuggah's 29.4" feels a bit much.

I settled on a Legator Ninja N8FX with a 26.5 to 28" mutli scale. It holds F# really nicely with 10-74 strings. It can hold F okay, but feels a little lax for my preference. I haven't tried thicker strings on it.

My Legator is soooo good.
I wish many here would drop their prejudices and try one

 

[Grindspine]

My Legator is soooo good.
I wish many here would drop their prejudices and try one

I definitely had some hangups about Korean guitars, mostly due to horrible fretwork and horrible hardware on a Korean-made Washburn that I still have. When I worked as a guitar tech, I saw more consistency in WMIC Korea's output. There were far fewer shoddy guitar builds and pretty good specs on most models.

The Legator N8FX had all of the specs that I wanted and a nice top. The QC, fit, and finish exceeded all expectations. I really have found no flaws with the guitar. The only thing I could even almost complain about is that the Fishman pickups have a shorter battery life than EMG, but I still go months between battery changes. The 26.5" - 28" scale wenge / maple neck, the ebony fretboard, the stainless frets, the Hipshot style bridge, it was all just really well built. It holds up pretty nicely even versus my Prestige RG, RGD, and RGDR.

I would have a really hard time going to a straight scale for an 8 after being spoiled by the multi-scale on this one.

 

[Grindspine]

Yeah I have baritones on the brain today but I’m trying to spitball ideas for one with the scale length that can do drop C# no problem all the way down to dummy low tunings like drop or octave E0 (expecting to get dummy thicc strings) Would 27 or 28 inch be that happy middle ground?

You know, it just struck me that if you got an Ibanez 9 string at 28", you could have C#0 and still have an E1 above it as the 9th and 8th strings if you want to get really creative with tunings.

 

[Wucan]

I really dig my Ormsby, which has a steep fan (25.5-28.3) but lets everything from Drop E to standard feel pretty comfortable without flubbing on the lowest string.

I feel like the fan is obligatory if you want to play an ERG while wanting the scale to feel "right" all the way through.