I heard from the Bragg Office today, forwarding Ben
Mandelson's details about his barizouki. Many thanks
to Ben and Toby.

BTW, when Ben writes about the tuning, "Low C, 8ve c,
low F, 8ve a, low A, 8ve a, low D, 8ve d," I'm sure he
intended to write "low F, 8ve f", not "8ve a". And
"8ve" means an octave.

--- BraggOffice@... wrote:
It's been a while coming, but Ben sent us the
following information on his string driven thing.
Hope it helps your e-group:

The instrument is a 'barizouki' (= baritone
bouzouki). The aim is to have a baritone voice one
octave below the regular (greek) bouzouki. This is a
prototype made from a Danelectro single-cutaway
baritone guitar.

The conversion was done by London master-luthier
Andrew Scrimshaw as follows:

the 2 sets of 3 tuning machine heads removed, holes
filled, and replaced with Schaller 4-a-side mandolin
sets; bridge/tailpiece removed and replaced with
trapeze-style tailpiece (to take the 8 strings); new
aluminium bridge block and compensated bridge cut to
take the 8 strings (but still looks like a real dano
part); new aluminium nut; strings as follows - 4 pairs
essentially one octave below the greek bouzouki, but
in octave pairs - (from low to high:) Low C, 8ve c,
low F, 8ve a, low A, 8ve a, low D, 8ve d. The Lowest C
is the C a major 3rd below the bottom E of a regular
guitar; Pickups as stock.

Because of the scale-length we have had to use a
cocktail of strings, but seems to be sort of
manageable. As there is no off-the-shelf dano
barizouki set, this is what we use:

1 D high 11 ernie ball
2 D 26w ernie ball
3 A high 16 picato extra long
4 A 45 rotosound bass, replace end with smaller ball
5 F high 24w ernie ball long loop end, add ball
6 F 56 ernie ball
7 C high 30w ernie ball
8 C 65 rotosound bass, replace end with smaller ball


Regards

Bragg Office


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