Thanks everyone for all the responses!
Certainly there are no wrong answers here, this is all in the design phase with an open road - and its what "you" think you'd want in this scenario, not what I think. This will be my first baritone guitar built with celtic type fingerstyle as a focus. I started the neck already which is hard maple, and I have the body drawn out. It may be chambered or solid, not sure yet. Chambering sounds like a bit of fun, I might do it. When I think of celtic guitar, like Stephen Wake, I believe that style benefits from lows that are tight and stringy, never too thick or muddy, and the trebles are very present with a nice defined sweet attack, almost aggressively so but not necessarily harsh or spicky. If I were to take a shot at an absurd analogy, I'm looking for a tone that say, more emulates a twinkly Larrivee acoustic than a dark low-mid heavy Martin. Larrivees to me can almost have a bit of a scooped tone with supple deep lows and sweet twinkly highs, but still manages to sound rich all the way from top to bottom. Perhaps I would benefit from a humbucker with series/parallel/cut coil to capture different responces that would benefit different ranges. some celtic guitar is done with low tunes strings, deep and dramatic while others are capoed high up and totally twinkle away. But I still had to wonder if there is a single coil out there that would check all the boxes for the application described. The pickup choice is in the future but, its time to start listening to a number of them in different guitars under different circumstances.
I was surprised that a few folks called out humbuckers. I'm sure there are a number of candidates but I usually think of a humbucker (in general) as being a thicker sound with less sparkly highs (the fact that you have two coils in series generally lowers the resonant frequency and makes for a more lower mid heavy tone). I was thinking single coils might win this one in the end but, we'll see - it sure ain;t over - just starting actually.
What I did was take the profile of a Telecaster exactly as is, and stretched the entire guitar from one end to the other by the same percent increase as is the string scale from 25.5" to 28.628 which is a multiplication factor of 1.22" I believe (28.625/25.5). And I left the side to side to side dimension alone, only stretched the lenght. The neck looks pretty cool! Cant wait to get to the body. In keeping with a brighter tonal presentation I was thinking Alder, Maple, maybe Ash for the body. I had to wonder if a more dense body wood might help reflect the highs, or keep the high frequency energy in the strings for the pickups to pickup. (accidental pun, sorry). I know wood like Mahogany may be loosely associated with a darker sound. But, who knows, perhaps the pickups would have more to say about the frequency content than the wood.
Well thank you for taking the time to comment on my odd ball project here, and I'm curious to hear some of the suggestions you have made.
Thanks!
Best,
Phil Donovan
