8 string tenor guitar

[PT66]

I am not a Facebook user. But I occasionally peek at the tenor guitar face book page. There was a post recently by a person named Will West who built an instrument he wanted to call an 8 string tenor guitar.

He was told by many that “tenor guitars have 4 strings” it must be a guitar body octave mandolin.
Well what about the 8 string tenor guitar played by Nick Reynolds of the Kingston Trio?

[fox]

I dont see any Tenor guitar police so I guess he can call it whatever he wants, if it is tuned in 5ths then personally I would call it a guitar bodied octave mandolin.

[pheffernan]

I dont see any Tenor guitar police so I guess he can call it whatever he wants, if it is tuned in 5ths then personally I would call it a guitar bodied octave mandolin.

What if it’s tuned CGDA?

[Seonachan]

Some people are more particular about parameters than others. We have a mix of lumpers and splitters here but we all seem to get along. I have a couple 24" scale tenors that some people would insist is a plectrum guitar. But if I joined a plectrum guitar forum, I suspect they'd shoo me back here for having too short a scale length. If it's a tenor to you, call it a tenor. Others will probably call it a GBOM or whatever and that's fine. I tend to think of 8 strings as mandola/OM territory regardless of body shape but plenty of people refer to them as 8-string tenors and I have no problem with that.

Our instrument's borders overlap with so many others - tenor banjos, mandolas/OM/bouzoukis, plectrum guitars, baritone ukuleles, and regular ol' guitars - that there's bound to be some messiness around nomenclature.

[Ray(T)]

“What if it’s tuned C,G,D,A?” - That would be a mandocello, wouldn’t it?

[PT66]

“What if it’s tuned C,G,D,A?” - That would be a mandocello, wouldn’t it?

Not if it was the same tuning as tenor banjo (an octave higher than cello).

[PT66]

I don’t do normal real well so I have often contemplated naming conventions for some of the hybrid instruments I have built. I usually consider body shape, scale length and tuning. But right now it seems there are 3 “standard” tunings for tenor guitar. CGDA (tenor banjo), GDAE (octave mandolin) and DGBE (Chicago). And a range of scale length from 20 inches to 24 inches.

[pheffernan]

“What if it’s tuned C,G,D,A?” - That would be a mandocello, wouldn’t it?

Wouldn’t it be a tenor mandola?

[PT66]

Wouldn’t it be a tenor mandola?

If it has a guitar shaped body and a 22 inch scale it could be a mandola but ……..it could be an hybrid of some kind.

[Ray(T)]

Presumably it would be logical to tune it an octave lower than an mandola hence a ‘cello.

[PT66]

In my mind 22 inches would be short for a mandocello, long for a mandola, just right for a tenor guitar.

[Ray(T)]

22” is less than 2” longer than my Clark GBOM.

[Harley Marty]

Wouldn’t it be a tenor mandola?

CGDA in viola is alto viola. GDAE in viola is tenor viola. I happen play an 18” tenor viola. Then if you tune a small cello to GDAE it’s generally called tenor violin

[20MartinA]

My wife's tenor is in "Chicago tuning", like a baritone uke DGBE. There are no rules. I saw a Dixieland plectrum banjoist playing in that tuning last week.
Here's my wife's 1931 Gibson TG-0.