Seven-string Guitars

For the longest time, getting a seven-string was never about the chug. After leaving my death metal days behind, the most of which were spent in D standard, I developed a little bit of an aversion to lower tunings. Sure, they sounded heavy and ballsy as hell. But they would frequently turn to mush, and I could never quite get over that if a riff needs to be tuned down to sound cool, it wasn’t good enough to begin with. It seemed to me a way worthier challenge to stick to standard tuning as far as I possibly could. The occasional drop-D was about as far as I went.

Specifically for that reason, when the idea to experiment with seven-strings struck me, it was more about incorporating the low B string into cleaner and more atmospheric stuff. Getting there took literally decades, chiefly because there were many guitar itches to scratch before coming around to comparatively low-priority stuff like extended-range guitars. And when I finally did so, I veered off course at the last moment and got myself a baritone guitar, specifically to avoid that extra string.

In the end, it turned out that theory is one thing and practice something else entirely. When I finally sat down with the baritone at home, the first thing I did was to go full djent on the low B. Next, I used it to lay down tracks for our then-current recording project, going down an octave where possible. That guitar changed things completely for me. I finally got it, I understood why so many metal guitar players tune down and never look back. There's just something with those low notes that (no pun intended) resonates deep within, in a way that standard tuning could never achieve. It wasn't just me, either. Everyone who heard the baritone loved it, the ones who sat down and played it almost didn't want to give it back to me. My original intention had been to get a character actress for a bit part. Instead I inadvertently got myself what looked more and more like a dark horse leading lady.

Getting the baritone didn't completely extinguish my desire to somewhere down the line get a seven-string, but it did put it off for a few years. The actual truth is a bit more nuanced. The reason why I got the baritone instead of the seven-string wasn't just that the special-edition PRS SE 277 was drop-dead gorgeous and sounded amazing. To the surprise of absolutely no one, the PRS seven-string I tried during the same visit made me feel stupid and incompetent. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that as long as I stayed away from sevens, I was never going to get better at playing them. What could I have expected? After all, I think my total stick time with seven-strings was something on the order of half an hour over 20+ years. In the end, I manned up and told myself that I could do it as long as I gave it a fair shot.

Making the decision to purchase the seven had surprisingly little to do with what I wanted or thought could be fun. It was the closest I’ve come in decades to actually needing a guitar. Come 2022-23, I had been relying heavily on the baritone for years, and as we were looking at gigs at the time, I felt I needed another guitar that was optimized for a low B string, in order to have a backup. Or, perhaps more properly, so I could make the baritone my backup. I love the sound of the 277, but it does have single-coil soapbar pickups, which are not especially conducive to my signature high-gain sound, especially not in electrically busy environments.

A second baritone—with humbuckers!—would have made the most sense, because of my many years of growing accustomed to B standard, the beefier strings and longer scale. It's never failed to amuse me that this is probably what a regular guitar feels like to a normal person. But that would have been kind of boring. It wouldn't have given me anything new. The bigger argument was that a second baritone guitar would mean another guitar that required D'Addario 14–68 strings. The gauges are perfect for the tuning and scale, and D'Addario make good products. But: with my body chemistry, they go dull in a week and are overdue for replacement after two. A seven-string would not just give me a new challenge, there would also be Elixirs made for it. It was also very likely that it would come with humbuckers. And I figured that it would be kind of good to not only get the top E string back, as it were, but also get a 24-fret guitar, my first one in 30 years.

There are two major technical issues with seven-string guitars. One is that the neck typically isn’t wide enough to keep the same string spacing as on a six-string. Another is that the scale length of a typical electric guitar isn’t nearly long enough to properly accommodate a string that is quite frankly more in the bass than the guitar register. Seven-string guitars tend to compromise with a scale length around 26.5 inches. That starts to create issues with the treble strings instead. Hence, many have started experimenting with multi-scale guitars, where the frets are not parallel but fanned out, so that the treble side has a shorter scale than the bass side. I still haven't got used to the look of multiscale guitars or basses, but on the few occasions I've tried them, I have been struck by how relatively easily I have adjusted to them.

My PRS seven-string, which is the Mark Holcomb signature model, has regular parallel frets and a scale length of the typical 26.5 inches. I had had a fair bit of apprehension about 10-gauge strings on that scale, but fortunately they felt surprisingly natural. It could very well be that all my playing time on the baritone has served to strengthen my left-hand fingers and make me more accustomed to slightly wider stretches. I did experiment with 9s on it, but soon went back to 10s.

Getting used to the low B was a hell of a lot easier than I thought it would be. My pre-purchase research was mostly about the adjustment from six to seven, and I got all sorts of advice. The tip that made the most sense to me involved ignoring the B string entirely until I had got used to the slightly more cramped string spacing. But I just couldn't leave my Gibsons and Fenders alone, and paradoxically, the more I played my six-strings, the more comfortable I felt coming back to the SVN. I don't know how to explain this other than that I have spent most of my playing career jumping back and forth between many different types of guitars, acoustic as well as electric, so I assume that my muscle memory performs best when asked to constantly recalibrate.

I also wasn't the least bit bewildered by the sudden addition of a top E string. Instead, I found myself completely boggled by the middle three strings. The slightly tighter spacing screwed things up royally, and I found myself putting my fingers down in the spaces between the strings, grabbing the wrong one, and then overcompensating when correcting. For a little while, I sounded like a complete newbie, totally unworthy of my bandmates. But I persisted, and made a point of woodshedding our songs just about daily, and eventually I made sense of my new surroundings.

I like the range of the seven-string. Four and a half octaves are pretty nice. But as soon as I've said that, I'll come clean and say that I never felt limited by the range of the baritone. There were a few times when I missed the top E string, but that was mostly to have the regular assortment of open-position chords available, and never about the top end of the range. Already before I got the baritone, I was pretty in tune with the fact that I actually seldom go above the top A or B of a regular guitar.

When I see other guitar players live or on video, it is telling that no one seems to pull out a seven-string unless a song specifically calls for that extra range. I made it a point to learn how to play all the songs in our current repertoire on the seven, including recalibrating my left thumb to wrap across and mute two strings instead of just one. That way I can do it all on the seven, and I don't need to schlep two guitars all across town. There are a handful of songs that enable slightly more logical fingerings in B standard than E standard + low B, but I can make it work well enough for rehearsals and gigs.

So what's next—eight strings? It isn't as far-fetched as one might think. I might not do it for the low F sharp, but then again, that's what I once said about the low B. The thing that I find handy with eight-strings is that you have a huge range available without position-shifting. If I'm playing a natural E minor scale in the 12th position, not an altogether uncommon prospect for me, then I have the low E of a regular guitar available on the 10th fret of the F♯ string. It is an interesting idea and who knows, I might get around to trying it out some day?