Lesson Five: Scale Length and Tunings

Now, if you want a long-necked goose of a string instrument, you can play the plectrum banjo. A "plectrum" is a flat pick, and plectrum banjos are called that because they are strummed, unlike bluegrass banjos, with which players use finger picks.

The song "Bye Bye Blues" is one of the most popular for plectrum banjo players because the melody notes jump up and down in big intervals, giving the same effect as a brass band playing "Tiger Rag," where the trombone slide goes in a out in big swoops

Besides allowing room for big jumps between notes, string instruments which have a long scale length (measurement between the nut, where the headstock meets the fretboard, and the bridge) are also good for complex melodies or playing styles in which the artist plays both melody and accompaniment, or when there's both a main melody and a counter-melody. 

In this next video, Chris Smither plays an acoustic guitar with a larger body size than the plectrum banjo's. This guitar also has a shorter neck than the long one on the plectrum banjo.  In the song "Killin' the Blues," the melody notes close together,  and Smither uses arpeggios (little runs of notes in the place of a single note). He doesn't want the notes jumping up high and then down lown, because he has a pleasant smoky baritone voice and he's playing a guitar accompaniment which matches his vocal range. 

Next, we have another style of music which doesn't use very much of the guitar neck and which is suitable for a short-scale instrument.  In this video lesson, the instructor is showing us how to play in the style Mother Maybelle Carter made famous. If you watch the player's fingers on the fretboard, he is lifting fingers or putting them down and he's shifting a finger here and there from one string to the next string over, but his hand is not going up and down from the headstock toward the sound hole. 

When one is playing electric, rather than acoustic, guitar then all kinds of slides and metallic noises and squeals and stuff are possible. So Jimi Hendrix needed some fret room to do his magic on Purple Haze.

That sliding along the string move? Right out of Bo Diddley's songbook. Check out the intro to this classic. 

But look an older Bo playing one of his other hits. I know he's moving the guitar around with enthusiastic showmanship, but try to catch a glimpse of the fretboard. What do you see there?

If you play guitar or you know someone who does, you recognize that tie clip lookin' thing as a capo. Bo was old school so he had the model that wrapped around the neck of his guitar. The modern capo is usually a "trigger" model. 

By using a capo to clip off the strings, he is shortening the string length. In Lesson Four of this series, there was a brief mention of Pythagoras, who observed and noted what happened to musical notes when a string was fretted somewhere along its length. The sound got higher and one note became another, depending on where the pressure was applied to the string. 

Bo could have clamped that capo on a number of different frets along the neck, but where he has it in the "You Can't Judge a Book" video gives the guitar that chip-choppy rhythmic sound that he could mix up, speed up, and dance to. (I like the little bent-knees bounce, myself!)

Sometimes, with a stringed instrument, the scale length (nut to bridge) makes it possible to do a very different tuning. Compare these two short music videos. 

The Player uses the same fingering -- though this might be hard to judge because on the larger instrument it's necessary to spread the fingers farther apart.  But you see that it's the same person, and you can hear that it's the same melody. The version on the shorter-necked, smaller-bodied mandolin in the second video sounds very different. 

The instruments in the two videos above, both played by Sierra Hull, are an octave apart. They both have four double sets ("courses") of strings tuned GG-DD-AA-EE, but the octave mandolin, the larger one in the top video has D strings which are tuned to the D below Middle C. The standard mandolin, which also uses GG-DD-AA-EE tuning, has D strings which are tuned to the D note one octave above the D string note of the octave mandolin.  The D of the smaller standard mandolin is the next note up from Middle C. The D for the octave mandolin is farther left on the piano, on the bass side of Middle C where the notes get deeper. 

Next lesson:  The movable CAGED system, barre chords, and what the late Richie Havens did with his thumb.