Ibanez AE255BT Baritone Acoustic
As an acoustic player, I naturally dabble with dropped or altered tunings. It kinda comes with the territory if you know what I mean. So when I found myself in the Midlands on a visit to the good people at Headstock Distribution at the back end of 2018, I became enchanted with an Ibanez baritone they had in their display area. I’ve played baritones before and, seeing that they are tuned down to B in their natural state, I’ve always got on with them in my guise as an occasional visitor to bass frequency land. Happily, Ibanez agreed to lend me one so that we could bond in private and I’ve had a grand time so far exploring its low-end charm. My original review appeared in issue 443, where the guitar earned itself a Guitarist Choice badge as an extremely well made instrument with a price that didn’t make your eyes water. A Longterm Test was suggested to me and I grabbed the chance to spend even more time with this fascinating acoustic.
Having played it for the past four or five months, however, the time had come to change the strings. Elixir – my go-to acoustic string brand – was good enough to supply a set of baritone strings, gauged at the standard 0.016 to 0.070 fit. All well and good. When I came to actually sit down to install them, I hit a bit of a snag as the tuners on the AE255BT seem to be of the standard variety, aimed at regular acoustic strings. Of course, the guitar came with a set of baritone strings fitted, but I haven’t a clue how they managed to get them on as I spent literally a few hours trying to get the bass 0.070 string through the eyelet in the appropriate tuner capstan.
Nothing I tried worked and I was beginning to think I must have missed something – but when I tried to refit the original string, thinking that it must be a slightly lighter gauge and that I had to rethink my restringing strategy, even that wouldn’t go back on. A mystery, to say the least. Not to be beaten, I had a thought: I have a stash of different gauges of string and I reasoned that fitting relatively heavy basses from a standard set of 0.013 to 0.056s and the trebles from the 0.016 to 0.070s might just place me in the hybrid ‘heavy top, light bottom’ ballpark. After all, using thick strings on a drop-tuned acoustic isn’t written in stone. On many occasions I’ve found myself retuning to open C (CGCGCD) or dropping the bass string on a set of 13s down to B, so why shouldn’t it work here?
The downside to this kind of behaviour on a regular acoustic guitar is the onset of floppiness and errant intonation – you have to be incredibly precise when you tune so low and deal with a bit of extra flaccidity in the strings, too, but it’s really nothing that the fingers can’t learn to love if you do it all the time. On the Ibanez, you’ve got the 27-inch scale length and slightly wider frets to deal with the prescribed BEAD F# B tuning, and while the thicker strings literally take up some of the slack, there’s really no reason why my hybrid set shouldn’t work a treat.
I set about restringing with Elixir 80/20 strings – these have more zinc in the alloy, offering a slightly brighter tone than phosper bronze – and I figured that the extra brightness would also play to my advantage on a guitar that is, by design, on the bassy side.
The end result is that I now have a guitar that is strung, bass to treble, 0.056, 0.045, 0.035, 0.030, 0.022, 0.016; the trebles stand firm, the basses are a little footloose and fancy free, but it’s nothing that I haven’t experienced before. In fact, my fingers feel far more at home with the gauges of the low strings because the guitar has lost that ‘almost a bass’ feel on those three strings. In short, the 80/20 option was inspired – although Elixir’s baritone set is 80/20 anyway, so I can’t take all the credit! But the difference sonically is that the guitar has lost any tendency towards ‘stuck in the mud’ bass and I feel it’s generally cheered up the sound a bit. It’s like the sun has come out from behind the clouds.
Now I’m thinking that this monster I’ve created might just be the perfect testbed for alternative tunings – and with stable intonation in the basses plus a brighter overall soundprint, the world of tuning flexibility is opened wide. I’ll report back on my findings in the next instalment.
“On many occasions I’ve found myself retuning to open C or dropping the bass string on a set of 13s to B, so why shouldn’t it work here?”
“Changing the string gauges has generally cheered up the sound a bit. It’s like the sun has come out from behind the clouds”