The 8-string guitar

My first idea for a guitar with extended tonal range appeared when I arranged keyboard music for the guitar duo that my wife and I had formed in the late seventies. In the early eighties I tried to convince one of Sweden's (at the time) best luthiers to build a «normal» classical guitar, but with two extra bass strings. It took a couple of years for him to collect the courage to create such a beast,
and at that point I quickly ordered two 8-string guitars, one «normal» and one slightly smaller. My idea was to tune the «normal» guitar (top to bottom) ebgdAEBF# and the smaller one a minor third higher. This, in my mind, would be ideal for duets, and it did work very well*.

Others have had similar thoughts about a guitar equipped with extra string. The 11-string «altgitarr» that Göran Söllscher and others use is one way of going (sort of mimicking the lute). Paul Galbraith and Alexander Vynograd are having their 8-string guitars tuned somewhat differently, but with the idea of using the extra strings as «normal» strings, rather than two extra bass notes.

For a long time I kept my eight-stringer tuned as originally planned, but then I came up with the concept of having – apart from one d and one A string – two e strings, two b strings and two f# strings (ebf#dAEBF#). I transcribed all Bach's «Lute suites» with that tuning.

After a couple of years I noticed that the lowest F# would almost never come into play ;-)
So I tuned up the 8th string to G – and after a while even the 3rd string was raised (from f# to g). Now, all of a sudden, I had an instrument on which I could play the new and updated arrangementas, and - also the normal guitar repertoire. Bingo!

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*
Unfortunately, my duo partner injured a shoulder so badly that further guitar playing came to a permanent halt. Of course that was a blow to both of us and a few years later I also stopped playing (slipping into a new career in the computer business).

When the new millennium was young I eventually started to pluck again, and now – since I'm retired and liberated from the tyranny of wage slavery :– I spend most of my time arranging and playing.