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There are several types of ten-string guitar, including:

• The five-course baroque guitar which can have nine or ten strings.

• The ten-string harp guitar, including:
  • The décacorde.
  • Other harp guitars, particularly of the romantic period.

• The viola caipira of Brazilian folk music.

• Ten-string steel guitars used in Hawaiian and Country and Western music.

• The modern ten-string extended-range classical guitar.

• Ten-string electric guitars, including:
  • The coursed versions of the Bich body shape.
  • The uncoursed solid-body electric ten-string guitar.

• The ten-string extended-range jazz guitar.

Other close relatives of the guitar or members of the guitar family which also have ten strings include:

• The vihuela de mano, an ancestor of the guitar, which had several variations including a five-course ten-string version.

• The Peurto Rican bordonua, a bass instrument most commonly having ten strings in five courses, although eight and twelve string versions also exist.

• The North Mexican bajo quinto, which is a five-course ten-string baritone instrument used in tejano and norteño music.

• The ten-string charango, a South American folk instrument which appears from the front to be a small guitar, and its larger relative the charangon. The charango's body was traditionally made from an armadillo shell and is these days often a wooden bowl. Both instruments are from the lute family, rather than the guitar family.

• The electric Chapman Stick, which may have eight, ten or twelve strings.

• The name cittern is given to a wide range of plucked instruments, including some modern guitar derivatives with ten strings.

Baroque guitar

The baroque guitar is one of the earliest instruments considered a guitar, and the first to have significant surviving repertoire.

Surviving baroque guitars have (or originally had) nine or ten strings, in five courses .

Ten-string harp guitars

Harp guitars typically feature a second neck, parallel to the fretboard, which carries extra strings which are never fretted but may be plucked or strummed. These extra strings are therefore played in a manner similar to those of the harp, while those of the principal neck are played as a guitar, hence the name harp guitar.

There have been many designs of harp guitar, but in the nineteenth century ten-string versions were particularly popular. The unfretted bass strings of these added resonance to any guitar music, and were also strummed or plucked in music specifically arranged for harp guitar.

Information on nineteenth-century harp guitars comes from three main sources:

• Surviving instruments (and in some cases, copies of instruments) in museums and private collections.
• Surviving music, tablature and in at least one case a complete student method for the instrument.
• Paintings and drawings in which the instrument is visible. These must of course be treated with some suspicion, as the artist may not have considered the details of the instrument important, and in the case of portraits may have completed these details from memory rather than at sittings.

Décacorde

In the early 19th century Ferdinando Carulli and René Lacôte developed a harp guitar they called the Décacorde (French for ten-string).

Carulli played this type of guitar and wrote a method for it titled Méthode Complète pour le Décacorde . In it he describes the tuning as C-D-E-F-G-A-d-g-b-e', with the upper five strings A-d-g-b-e' fretted and the lower basses C-D-E-F-G not fretted.

Carulli also wrote divertissements for this instrument.

Two Décacordes by Lacôte are housed in the Music Museum of the Cité de la Musique in Paris:

• One circa 1826, with five fretted and five unfretted strings .
• One circa 1830, with six fretted and four unfretted strings .

Other romantic harp guitars

Period harp guitars built by Johan George Scherzer survive. A copy of one of these, based on an original circa 1862, has six fretted and four unfretted strings .

Johann Kaspar Mertz is known to have played ten-string harp guitars. Based on surviving instruments and urtexts of music written for it, the tuning was A_I-B_I-C-D-E-A-d-g-b-e'.

Viola caipira

The viola caipira is a guitar with ten light steel strings in five courses, played with the fingers rather than with a plectrum. It is particularly prevelant in the folk music of Brazil, and is also played in Portugal where it was originally developed.

The violao braguesa is another ten-string Portuguese folk guitar .

Ten-string steel guitars

Hawaiian guitar

Hawaiian guitars are electric lap steel and table steel guitars with six, eight or ten strings per neck, and one or two necks. The ten-string single-neck instrument is one of the standard configurations, not one of the most common but not unusual either.

Pedal steel guitar

Most pedal steel guitars have either one or two ten-string necks. Some but by no means all advanced players use necks with more than ten strings, but ten strings is the normal minimum.

• The most common single-neck configuration is a ten-string neck with an E9 tuning. An instrument of this configuration is known as an S-10.

• The most common twin-neck configuration consists of two ten-string necks, the nearer tuned to a C6 tuning and the other tuned to an E9 tuning. An instrument of this configuration is known as a D-10.

The standard student pedal steel guitar is a single-neck ten-string instrument with three pedals and from one to five knee levers, tuned to E9 tuning .

The first step up from this is a professional S-10 with three or more pedals and four or five knee levers, and the most common next step up is to a D-10 with eight pedals and five knee levers. The D-10 is the most common configuration for professional players.

Some advanced players prefer to remain on an S-10 configuration, perhaps adding more pedals and/or knee levers. Other advanced players progress from the S-10 to a single neck instrument with twelve strings, either a U-12 which uses a universal tuning, or an S-12 which uses an extended E-9 tuning. Single neck instruments with more than twelve strings also exist, such as the fifteen-string universal tuning U-15, and double-neck with more than ten strings per neck, notably the D-12 with two twelve-string necks and various tunings most commonly based on extended E9 and extended C6 tunings.

Professional instruments are normally custom-made to order. Even in the case of an S-10, while the first three pedals and five knee levers are fairly standard in function, there are variations to the order of these and many players add others. Advanced players of all configurations tend to design their own individual setups, known as copedents, specifying the exact string tunings and gauges and the actions of the pedals and levers.

Ten-string extended-range classical guitar

The extended-range classical guitar is a classical guitar with additional strings, normally extra bass strings past the bass E string, that are available on the fingerboard.

Many configurations have been produced, but the ten-string classical guitar received a particular boost in 1964, when Narciso Yepes performed the Concierto de Aranjuez with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, using a ten-string guitar developed for him by José Ramírez III and a specific tuning designed to balance all resonances of the chromatic scale. This was significant for two reasons:

• The endorsement of an artist of Yepes' calibre drew attention to the instrument, and demonstrated its capabilities. From 1963 for the rest of his life, Yepes used only the ten-string guitar in recording and performance.

• The availability of high-quality ten-string classical guitars from the Ramírez Company allowed and encouraged other performers to investigate the instrument.

The use of the ten-string classical guitar is similar to that of the harp guitar:

• Six-string guitar music can be played on the first six strings, but with added resonance from the extra strings. This was Yepes' original intention and the reason for the design.

• Music specifically arranged for the instrument can make use of the extra strings directly. There are two main uses for the extra strings:
  • Music originally written for instruments with more than six strings can be more faithfully transcribed. Music written by Bach and his comtemporaries for lute is of particular interest in this regard.
  • New music specifically written the ten-string guitar can make use of the extra strings however the composer might wish.

Unlike the harp guitar, the extended-range classical guitar has a single neck and allows all strings to be fretted.

While the six-string classical guitar remains the standard and most common instrument, since 1963 ten-string guitars in similar configuration to the original Ramírez have been adopted by many classical guitarists and produced by several first-class luthiers, using both Yepes' original tuning and others.

Electric ten-string guitar

Bich 10

B.C.Rich produce three models of solid body ten-string guitar, all of them strung and tuned in the same way.

These are six-course instruments, unlike most ten-string guitars which either have ten individual strings or five two-string courses. The B.C.Rich ten-string is tuned and played similarly to a six-string, but with two-string courses in place of four of the single strings of the six-string.

This instrument was introduced as a custom order model with a new body shape known as the Bich at the 1978 NAMM Show. There were two innovative features:

• The stringing. The top E and B strings were strung as unison pairs, and the G and D strings as pairs with a principal and octave string, all in the same way as the twelve-string guitar. However the A and lower E strings were single. This was claimed to give the brightness of the twelve, while allowing higher levels of distortion before the sound became muddy.

• The positioning of the machine heads. The Bich had a conventional six-string head for tuning the principal strings, with the four extra strings tuned by machine heads positioned in the body, past the tailpiece. This helped determine the radical shape of the body, and countered the tendency of coursed electric guitars to be head-heavy owing to the weight of the the extra machine heads.

The design was successful enough to be still in production as a ten-string, but many players also bought it for the body shape rather than the ten-string feature, and simply removed the extra strings. B.C.Rich recognised this by releasing six-string models of the Bich body shape.

All Bich variants are hard tail guitars with through body necks and two humbucking pickups. The ten-string models differ from each other in finish and control details .

Halo XS1

The Halo Guitars XS1 is a solid body ten-string guitar with ten individual steel strings, two EMG ten-string pickups, and a Kahler ten-string tremolo arm .

Gadotti Guitars 10 String Nylon King Electric

In January, 2009, Gadotti Guitars announced the 10 String Nylon King Electric, a solid body, nylon-stringed ten-string guitar, suitable for both Yepes and other tunings such as the Baroque.

Ten-string jazz guitar

A ten-string jazz guitar by Mike Shishkov, based on the ten-string extended-range classical guitar, was demonstrated at the 3rd International Ten String Guitar Festival in October, 2008.

See also

• List of extended-range guitar players
• Sympathetic strings
• String resonance (music)

References

1. Guitar, late 17th century at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)
2. Guitar, 1697 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
3. What is a Harp Guitar? gives both layman's and highly technical definitions
4. Multi-Bass 7-string, 8-string, 9-string, 10-string and 19th Century Harp Guitars by Len Verrett
5. The Lacôte Décacorde and Heptacorde by Gregg Miner
6. Lacôte Décacorde of 1826
7. Lacôte Décacorde of 1830
8. Scherzer harp guitar of 1862
9. See Lark in the Morning
10. The StartUp Steel, describes some models for beginner pedal steel guitarists
11. Hows a 10-string work? at the B.C.Rich website
12. Classic Bich 10 at the B.C.Rich website
13. Exotic Classic Bich 10 at the B.C.Rich website
14. Perfect Bich 10 at the B.C.Rich website
15. Halo XS1 description at the Halo Guitars website
16. Review of the Gadotti 10 String Nylon King Electric
17. See here for a photo of a ten-string jazz guitar by Mike Shishkov

External links

• Viktor van Niekerk's myspace site links to various articles and other media related to the modern 10-string guitar, and enthusiastically supports the original Yepes tuning.
• 10-string guitar Yahoo Group, open archive and membership.
  • Tuning for Bach Lute Suite on the 10-string guitar, as used by Stephan Schmidt for his recording of Bach's lute music.
• First International Ten-String Guitar Festival, Litchfield, Connecticut, July 7-10, 2005.
• Informative blog with a performance video on ten-string guitar.

• Guitars
• Classical guitar
• Electric guitars
• Chordophones
• Reentrant tunings