1970s Taiwan-made Kid Guitar to Nylon Tres-ish Conversion

This same, basic, piece-of-junk kiddo guitar (with a scale close to a tenor ukulele) has been made from the '70s right through until now, shifting from Taiwan to China to Indonesia as the molds change hands. This one looks like a late-'70s one and it was gifted to me.

I think these are basically worthless as guitars -- there are better instruments to hand kids to use -- but a quick check on this one showed that the bridge and saddle were in the right place (for the first time ever) and that it only needed a light level/dress of the frets and a mild setup to make it play right.

I did that work and also converted it to 3x2 stringing in a tres-like format. I used two sets of ukulele CEA strings and tuned it CEG in unison. I know that's not very "tres" but the format does make you want to pick notes in a tres-like fashion. Besides, with different gauges, it can be strung for whatever tuning is desired. Nylon (or fluorocarbon, in this case) pretty-much intonates on a straight line.

So -- there you go -- I give you this idea to borrow -- just some more refuse turned into something that might be useful on recording or mixed into a group session on the other side of its conversion.







Comments

Oscar Stern said…
You could tune it G, C, E, (or G, B, E) as a Nylon strung Cuban Tres using the bottom 3 pairs of strings from an 8 string Ukulele string set.