Guitarra Baiana - fun stuff

[Chinn]

A post elsewhere in the forum by Pete, has me looking at guitarra baiana again. Wonderful little instruments with so much common DNA to our instruments.

This vid shows some of the original Pau Electrico which predates our instruments and seems like the grand daddy of all of our instruments. Fun video.

[Soundfarmer Pete]

And people worry when they can`t get the intonation right on their Mandobirds

[Marty Jacobson]

So were these the first "headless" instruments? If this is from the early '40's, that would be a pretty radical departure from what Leo and Les were doing around that time...

[Soundfarmer Pete]

So were these the first "headless" instruments? If this is from the early '40's, that would be a pretty radical departure from what Leo and Les were doing around that time...

Plenty of examples of instruments tuned fron the body end dating back hundreds of years....hurdy gurdys for example where some strings had the pegs at the end of the key box and others on the tailpiece.......very rare that anything is truly original!
Thinking about it, a guitar with a Floyd Rose trem is actually TUNED from the body end

[Elliot Luber]

Long before Ned Steinberger came around. Of course he had his own innovations such as double-ball end tuning and use of dense composits for sustain.