Baritone guitar players: who plays baritone and what strings they use

A baritone guitar is a standard-interval guitar built on a longer scale, usually 27 to 30 inches, so it holds useful tension at pitches below standard E. The extra scale length is the whole point. Tune a normal 25.5 inch guitar down to B or A and the low strings turn to spaghetti; put the same pitches on a 27 to 30 inch neck and they stay firm and articulate.

Because it is still played like a guitar, baritone crosses genres that never share a stage. The players below are documented users from five different worlds: post-punk and goth (Robert Smith), progressive metal (John Petrucci), modern jazz (Pat Metheny), sludge and prog metal (Bill Kelliher), and the rock-and-roll instrumental era (Duane Eddy). Where a source pins down the strings, we cite the gauge. Where it does not, we say so rather than inventing a spec.

Robert Smith's low, washed-out guitar textures are a big part of The Cure's sound, and his Schecter signature baritone is built for exactly that. The Schecter Robert Smith UltraCure VI is a 30 inch (762 mm) scale baritone loaded with three Seymour Duncan SJAG-1 single-coil-sized pickups (bridge, middle, neck), a TonePros bridge with brass saddles, and Hipshot locking tuners.

The interesting string detail: Schecter's own spec sheet lists the factory strings as Ernie Ball Regular Slinky #2221 (.010 to .046). That looks light for a baritone until you remember the physics. A 30 inch scale adds a lot of tension, so a set that would feel slack on a 25.5 inch guitar reads as firm here. We cite that as the documented factory spec. Schecter does not publish the tuning the guitar ships in, so we do not claim one.

Progressive metal leans on baritone for weight without dropping all the way to a seven- or eight-string, and John Petrucci is a documented example. Premier Guitar's Dream Theater Rig Rundown lists a 27 inch scale Music Man BFR Baritone with a maple top and tobacco finish in his touring boat of guitars, alongside his standard JP models and a seven-string.

Petrucci is a longtime Ernie Ball player, and the rundown documents a custom .010 to .046 set on his standard six-string JP guitars. It does not spell out the baritone's own gauge, and the only tuning it names is a separate aluminum-top JP dropped to D. So for the baritone specifically, the brand is documented (Ernie Ball) but the exact gauge and tuning are not, and we leave them unconfirmed. See his full rig page for the rest of the setup.

Baritone is not just a metal instrument, and Pat Metheny is the proof. He records and tours solo baritone pieces built on custom guitars from Canadian luthier Linda Manzer, a collaborator of more than 40 years. His 2003 album One Quiet Night is a solo steel-string baritone record, most of it improvised in a single evening.

Per Acoustic Guitar's 2024 interview, his more recent work is on a Manzer nylon-string baritone strung with sets from the Argentinean company Magma, which let him reach higher and lower pitches at a workable tension. He tunes the instrument roughly A to A, with the third and fourth strings raised an octave, and describes the result as three two-string instruments stacked together, closer to writing for a string trio than to normal guitar. The specific string gauges are not published, so we cite the brand and the tuning concept, not invented numbers.

Mastodon's Crack the Skye was the band's most experimental record, and part of that came from the gear lying around producer Brendan O'Brien's Southern Tracks studio in Atlanta. In Guitar Player's 2024 interview, Bill Kelliher describes it plainly: "There's all kinds of amps, and guitars, and the baritone guitar that's on Ghost of Karelia at the heavy part. I'd never played one before. I thought, this will really thicken up the sound."

So the documented fact is specific: a baritone guitar on the heavy section of "Ghost of Karelia," used to add low-end thickness. It was a studio instrument rather than Kelliher's own, and the interview does not name the brand, model, tuning, or strings, so we do not attach any. It is a clean example of baritone used as a one-track color rather than a main instrument.

Before "baritone guitar" was a category players shopped for, Duane Eddy was making low-string melody the hook of hit records. His "twang" sound, single-note lines played low with tremolo and echo, charted 15 top 40 singles from 1958 to 1963 and prefigured what baritone players do today. Eddy died in 2024.

His Gretsch signature sits right in the baritone and Bass VI overlap. Per Gretsch's own feature, the G6120TB-DE is a 30.3 inch scale hollowbody "6-String Bass," nicknamed Tic-Tac-Twang, tuned E to e (a full octave below a standard guitar) and loaded with twin DynaSonic pickups and a Bigsby. Gretsch markets it as a bass, but at 30.3 inches and voiced for chord and melody work, it plays like a very low baritone. The signature page does not specify a string set, so that stays unconfirmed.

The thread across a goth frontman, a prog-metal virtuoso, a jazz composer, a sludge-metal riff writer, and a rock-and-roll pioneer is the scale length. Every one of these instruments runs long, from Petrucci's 27 inch neck to Duane Eddy's 30.3 inch Gretsch, so the low strings stay tight. Tuning is where they split: B or A standard for the metal and rock lane, A-to-A with octave strings for Metheny's jazz, E-to-e for Eddy's tic-tac twang.

Strings follow the same logic every time, heavier than a standard set because the pitch is lower and the scale is longer. The catch is documentation. Only Robert Smith's set is nailed down at the string level, and even that is a factory spec from Schecter, not a personal preference statement. For the others we cite the brand where it is public and leave the exact gauge open rather than guessing.

If you want one off-the-shelf set built for baritone, the Ernie Ball Baritone Slinky is the reference. It is the only baritone-specific set in the Slinky family, and its .013 to .072 spread is aimed squarely at B standard and A standard on a long scale. For very low tunings on a shorter 27 inch baritone you may still want to step the bottom string up.

• Tunings: B standard, Drop A.
• Extended-range rosters: Top 7-string players, Top 8-string players.
• Gauge reference: 8-string guitar string gauge guide for the tension physics that also applies to baritone.
• Individual rig: John Petrucci.