Dreadnought Baritone

$495.00

Tags: Boneyard, Copy Available, Garage, Original Available, Reclaimed Instrument

Categories: 30" scale, Baritone Guitar, Conventional, Hollow-Body, Pro

A 30-inch-scale baritone built around a dreadnought acoustic body and rosewood archtop bridge — an evolving Rubÿtone Garage project with a wider custom fingerboard still to come.

Dreadnought Baritone is a 30-inch-scale hollow-body experiment built from an orphaned Aria acoustic body and an unusually narrow, nearly untapered bass neck.

The Aria dreadnought was originally manufactured with a bolt-on neck and a true neck pocket, making the neckless body particularly well suited to an unconventional conversion. Rather than restoring it with another Aria neck, the existing pocket became the starting point for a substantially longer-scale instrument that falls somewhere between conventional guitar and bass territory.

The mahogany neck has a rosewood fingerboard, 22 frets and an unusually parallel profile with very little widening toward the body. A rosewood archtop bridge completes the current mock-up.

Dreadnought Baritone remains in the Garage because the neck itself is still under development. The next step is an experiment to widen the fingerboard rather than replace the unusual neck with a conventional one.

A NUX Mighty Air stereo amplifier is also planned for the next version, giving the 30-inch-scale instrument amplification capable of handling its extended low range while taking advantage of the space available inside the dreadnought body.

Want to take this one all the way? Let's talk.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Baritone Guitar
Approach	Reclaimed-Instrument Build, RestoMod
Construction	Conventional, Hollow-Body
Body	Standard Acoustic Guitar
Beam
Neck	Mahogany
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Modified Headstock
Scale Length	30"
Number of Frets	21
Bridge	Rosewood Archtop Guitar
Tailpiece	Trapeze Tailpiece
Neck Pickup
Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup
Pickup Switch
Controls
Knobs
Amplifier	NUX Mighty Air
Power Supply

Dreadnought Baritone

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

9.00 / 10

315 / 350 points

playing

Fun to Play

The first test is whether the guitar makes you want to keep playing it. A high score means the instrument feels inviting, responsive, and rewarding rather than merely interesting to look at. The best examples have enough soul that you forget you are evaluating them and simply keep going.

Playability

Measures how naturally the instrument responds to ordinary playing technique across the neck. Action, fretwork, neck feel, access, and setup should work together without asking the player to compensate for the design. A strong score means the unusual construction never becomes an excuse for compromised playing.

Ergonomics

Considers how comfortably the instrument sits against the body, hangs from a strap, and positions the hands. Weight distribution matters as much as total weight, especially when found objects or onboard amplification shift the center of gravity. The most artful solutions make an unconventional shape feel surprisingly natural.

Tone Quality

Judges the character, clarity, richness, and usefulness of the instrument’s core sound. The goal is not one supposedly perfect tone, but a voice with musical identity and enough detail to reward attentive playing. The highest scores go to guitars whose sound has real soul rather than merely acceptable frequency response.

Tonal Versatility

Measures how many genuinely useful sounds the instrument can produce rather than simply counting switches and settings. Different pickup combinations and controls should create musically distinct choices that a player would actually use. A clever circuit scores higher when its versatility feels purposeful instead of complicated for its own sake.

build

Fit & Finish

Evaluates the precision and care visible in joints, edges, fretwork, hardware installation, surfaces, wiring, and final setup. Handmade character is welcome; carelessness is not the same thing as character. A strong score shows experienced workmanship while allowing the object to retain the marks and soul of its previous life.

Portability

Measures whether the instrument’s mass and dimensions make sense for the way it is meant to be used. A guitar with an onboard amp may reasonably weigh more, but every added ounce should earn its place. High scores reward designs that are easy to carry, hold, busk with, or live with without sacrificing the idea.

Reliability

Rates the likelihood that the guitar will keep working properly through normal playing, transport, and repeated use. Structural joints, wiring, controls, hardware, and power systems should feel dependable rather than experimental in the risky sense. A high score means the wit of the design is backed by experienced engineering.

Repairability

Considers how sensibly the instrument can be serviced when something eventually wears out or fails. Standard parts, accessible wiring, replaceable components, and understandable construction all help. The strongest designs are inventive without turning a future repair into an archaeological excavation.

Solutions

Scores the quality of the solutions used when unconventional materials create unconventional problems. Beam placement, neck angle, pickup clearance, feedback, balance, and internal packaging are all opportunities to demonstrate experience. High scores go to solutions that are technically sound and artful enough to look inevitable afterward.

Integration

Measures how successfully all the unrelated parts become one coherent working instrument. Neck, beam, body, hardware, electronics, amplifier, and found objects should cooperate mechanically and visually. The best integrations have a kind of soul: the parts stop looking assembled and start looking as though they found each other.

design

Innovation

Measures whether the guitar introduces a genuinely fresh idea, solution, relationship, or way of thinking about an instrument. Novelty alone is not enough; the innovation should improve the object, deepen the concept, or open a useful new possibility.

Shouldn’t Work

Rewards designs that appear improbable but succeed because the underlying engineering is sound. The wit comes from the gap between what your eyes expect and what your hands and ears discover.

Beauty

Judges visual appeal without assuming that beauty must mean polished, conventional, or expensive. Proportion, material, color, age, texture, and restraint can all create beauty in very different ways.

Sculpture

Considers the guitar as a three-dimensional object even when nobody is playing it. Silhouette, negative space, depth, structure, and the relationship between functional parts should reward viewing from more than one angle.

Coherence

Measures whether the many materials, colors, shapes, and components read as one intentional composition. A Rubÿtone can be busy, strange, or witty without looking accidental.

Relic

Rates the visual and emotional value of genuine age, wear, patina, scars, repairs, and evidence of earlier use. Authentic history carries more weight than artificially manufactured distress.

concept

Stage Presence

Measures how strongly the instrument communicates from across a room or under performance conditions. Silhouette, scale, color, movement, and unusual construction can all contribute before a note is heard.

Stands Alone

Judges whether the instrument feels complete and compelling without requiring a long explanation of why it matters. The story may deepen the experience, but the object should already make a persuasive case visually and musically.

Material Story

Considers how much meaning comes from the history and previous purpose of the materials themselves.

Transformation

Measures how completely the original object has been given a convincing second identity without erasing where it came from.

Boneyard Score

Rates how deeply the instrument embodies the practice of building from saved, secondhand, leftover, or previously overlooked materials.

Necessity

Asks whether each major component has a reason to be there. Extra hardware, controls, decorative pieces, and technology should contribute to function, story, balance, or visual composition.

personality

Story

Measures the strength of the narrative carried by the guitar’s materials, development, accidents, people, places, and decisions.

Surprise

Rates the number and quality of discoveries the instrument offers after the first glance.

Conversation

Measures how naturally the guitar makes people curious enough to ask questions.

Cool Factor

Captures the difficult-to-measure quality that makes an instrument desirable before every reason can be itemized.

Identity

Measures how immediately the guitar feels like itself rather than a variation of something more familiar.

Rubÿtone DNA

Rates how clearly the instrument expresses the recurring ideas behind Rubÿtone: reuse, structural invention, functional sculpture, irreverence, and serious playability.

impact

Humor

Measures whether the guitar contains genuine wit rather than a joke pasted onto an otherwise ordinary object.

Punchline

Judges whether the concept resolves into a satisfying final idea—the moment when the viewer suddenly understands why a particular object, material, or decision is there.

Disdain

Measures the willingness to question inherited rules about what an electric guitar is supposed to look like, contain, or be made from.

Rules

Rates how effectively the instrument departs from established guitar-building conventions while remaining musically and structurally convincing.

Copy Potential

Considers whether the central idea could inspire a new custom build without requiring an exact duplicate of the original.

Evolution

Measures how much useful creative territory remains in the idea after this particular guitar is finished.

THE STORY

Under Construction

An Orphaned Acoustic Body Looking for a Different Kind of Neck

I acquired this body without a neck.

It came from a mid-level Aria dreadnought acoustic that was unusual because it had been built at the factory with a bolt-on neck and an actual neck pocket.

I never had the original neck, and I don't particularly care which Aria model it was.

What interested me was the body.

That open neck pocket made it an invitation to try something that the original guitar was never intended to do.

The neck I put into it started out on a cheap imported bass.

One of the strange things about it is that the fingerboard has virtually no taper. Instead of getting noticeably wider as it approaches the body, the sides remain almost parallel.

Combined with the dreadnought body and a 30" scale, it started pointing toward something somewhere between guitar and bass.

That's where Dreadnought Baritone is now.

The Reason This Rubÿtone Is in the Garage

The neck isn't finished.

I have an idea for making the fingerboard wider, and I want to see how far I can take it.

I could simply replace this oddball neck with something more conventional.

But where's the fun in that?

The unusual neck is one of the reasons this guitar exists in the first place. I'd rather use what is strange about it as the starting point for the next experiment.

The guitar works as a mock-up now.

But I can see what I want it to become.