What Are Tenor Guitars?
Tenor guitars are interesting four stringed instruments normally made in the shape of a guitar, or sometimes with a lute-like pear shaped body or, rarely, with a round banjo-like wooden body. They can be acoustic and/or electric and they can come in the form of flat top, archtop, wood-bodied or metal-bodied resonator or solid-bodied instruments. Tenor guitars generally have a scale length of around 23 inches, but sometimes as low as 21 inches, and are usually tuned in fifths, as CGDA, similar to the tenor banjo, Other tunings are possible, however, such as ‘guitar tuning’ or ‘Chicago tuning’ – DGBE, ‘Irish’ or ‘octave mandolin’ tuning – GDAE and various ‘open’ tunings, such as CGCG and DADA, which can be used for slide playing. CGDA Tenor Guitar Tuning The normal CGDA fifths tuning is wide and therefore very ‘open’ and it gives the instrument wonderful voicings from both open and closed chords. The fifths tuning also makes for very logical chord shapes that can be moved up and down the
