I enjoyed the extra range of the Bellido 10 string so much I asked Andy Manson if he would build me a 10 string steel strung guitar. 3 months later a flight case arrived and I saw yet more sleepless nights ahead! I wanted to have the crisp sweetness of a steel string with the added depth of the bass register.
It is tuned the same as the Bellido, that is from high to low,E,B,G,D,A,E,B,A,E,D.I.
I use picato strings the gauges are ,011,013 ,020,26 ,36,46,60,70,80,90.
It does not take long to get used to the huge range in string tension. The guitar has a spruce top, the back and sides are English cherry, the neck is mahogany and the fingerboard is Rosewood. It has a Kent Armstrong 10 string single coil pick up with a phase switch and an AKG mic. The Kent Armstrong pick up is a powerful pick up with a hybrid tone somewhere between the neck pick up on a tele and an electro acoustic.
The AKG microphone is very clean and precise. It has a single truss rod and the neck measures 94 mm wide at the neck joint and 75 mm at the nut. The neck is shallow and it is very comfortable to play.The body is quite thin at 34mm and the neck is 44cm. The guitar is designed to be an electro acoustic rather than a straight acoustic.
The low strings really do have a piano like quality which I have found very useful in expanding chord voicings. My voice is in the bass baritone register so I do find this extra range suits my voice and can add drama to lyrics. Although it would be some time away I would like to have a larger acoustic made that had the range of a piano as I feel that there is so much potential in the extended range of the acoustic guitar. The Russian composer Scriabin described his approach to piano music as if imagining the sound from being on the inside of the piano with all the fantastic resonances that could be heard ,I like to think like this as I like to see and hear artists that overwhelm me be it Scriabin, Jeff Beck or Salvador Dali etc. Striving for an inside the instrument sound leads me to the big brother of the trio.