Vintage Tenor
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Vintage Tenor Guitars For sale
Vintage Tenor Guitars For sale
Tenor guitars have been around for over a hundred years, and have been built in all shapes and styles. A Tenor guitar is a fretted, four stringed instrument, most commonly shaped like a guitar with a scale of app 23 and made of bronze strings for acoustic, steel for electric and an octave mandolin guitar tuning.
The tenor guitar is tuned exactly like a tenor banjo, and one of the major roles of the tenor guitar has been to allow tenor banjo players, and possibly mandolin family players, because of their similar tunings, to instantly double on the guitar without having to learn the scales and chord shapes for the entirely different tuning of a six string guitar.
The tenor guitar can be considered to be a transition instrument between Dixieland banjo and the six string swing guitar, particularly as it started to outpace the tenor banjo in popularity, towards end of the 1920s. This trend quickened when important players of the period like Eddie Lang and Carl Kress, switched from banjo to six string guitars. Clearly though the tenor guitar has a distinctive sound and style of its own, and there is literally no limit to the many styles of music that can be made from this unique instrument which can be heard in country music, western swing, and jazz, as well as contemporary folk and pop music.