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Seven- and Eight-String Guitars, Explained
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About this reference
From the music-learning collection, adapted for Philojain Music Muse. Referenced sources remain credited in the article.
Gear · Instrument Reference
The obvious way to get lower is to tune a six-string down further. The obvious way runs out fast — go far enough and the low string turns to rubber. Extended-range guitars solve the same problem a different way: add strings, and often add scale length, so the low end stays usable and the top strings stay in a register that still plays like a guitar. This page works through why that trade beats just tuning down harder, and the tunings and construction choices that make it work.
01 — Why Not Just Tune the Low String Down Further?
Why Not Just Tune the Low String Down Further?
The obvious fix for wanting a lower note is tuning an existing string down further, and it works — up to a point. A vibrating string’s tension depends on its length, its pitch and its mass per unit length together; drop the pitch on an unchanged gauge and scale length, and tension falls with it. Past a certain point that loss of tension stops being a minor feel change and starts being a real problem — the string gets noticeably floppier, intonation and note definition suffer, and fret buzz becomes hard to avoid, especially on a string that’s already thick and low-pitched to begin with.
That physical ceiling is exactly what extended-range guitars are built to work around, rather than push past.
02 — The Extra-String Answer
The Extra-String Answer
Instead of dragging every string’s tuning down to reach a lower note, a seven-string guitar simply adds one — typically a low B sitting below the standard low E — and an eight-string adds a second, typically a low F#. The top strings stay in their familiar standard-guitar register, so existing technique, chord vocabulary and muscle memory mostly transfer directly, while the added string or strings extend the instrument’s range downward without asking any single string to carry more tension loss than it comfortably can.
That’s the real answer to “why not just tune down further”: it isn’t that tuning down doesn’t work, it’s that adding range this way keeps the rest of the instrument exactly where a guitarist already knows it, rather than trading the whole instrument’s familiar feel for a lower note.
03 — Scale Length and Multiscale/Fanned-Fret Design
Scale Length and Multiscale/Fanned-Fret Design
Some extended-range instruments go a step further with multiscale — often called fanned-fret — construction, where the bass strings run on a longer scale length than the treble strings, with the frets angled between the two rather than running straight across. Stringjoy’s own explainer names the problem this solves directly: a standard off-the-shelf string set tuned down to something like drop C on a fixed, shorter scale often leaves the low string “really, really floppy,” exactly the tension problem described above.
A longer scale on the bass side restores tension to that low string without needing an unusually heavy gauge, while a shorter scale stays on the treble side where standard bends and fast fretting-hand work are easiest. The tradeoff is an adjustment period — the angled frets look and feel unfamiliar at first — but most players adapt within a reasonable amount of practice, and some report bending and sliding actually feel easier once they have.
04 — What Extended-Range Playing Actually Changes
What Extended-Range Playing Actually Changes
Beyond the physical instrument, extended range mostly changes what’s reachable, not how a guitarist plays what they already know. The added low string or strings usually sit in whatever tuning the player finds useful for the material — there’s no single universal standard the way there is for six-string EADGBE — and the down-tuning and drop-tuning concepts covered elsewhere on this site apply just as directly to those added strings as to a standard six-string’s.
It’s also worth being honest that an eight-string isn’t mandatory for reaching very low pitches. The same low notes are reachable on a heavier-gauge, drop- or down-tuned six- or seven-string — the real choice is about which tension, feel and hand-position tradeoff a player wants, not about which instrument is technically capable of the pitch.
05 — Common questions
Common questions
Why not just play a baritone guitar instead of adding strings?
It’s a genuinely comparable option, built on a different tradeoff. A baritone guitar extends range with a longer scale and heavier strings across all six strings at once — closer in spirit to down-tuning plus a gauge change than to adding a string. An extended-range guitar instead keeps the top strings in standard territory and adds pitch only through new strings. Both are legitimate; they suit different playing styles.
Do seven- and eight-string guitars need special string sets?
Generally yes — purpose-made extended-range sets exist with the low string or strings already gauged appropriately for the extra pitch drop, which saves a player from hand-assembling a set from individual strings, though some players do exactly that anyway for more control over the exact tension.
Is a multiscale neck harder to play?
There’s a real adjustment period since the frets aren’t parallel and the fretting hand has to learn a slight angle change across the neck, but per Stringjoy’s account most players adapt fairly quickly, and some find bending and sliding easier once they have, not harder.
Do I need an eight-string to play extended-range heavy music?
No. Eight-string is common in some corners of the genre but far from mandatory — the same low pitches are reachable on a down-tuned or drop-tuned six- or seven-string with an appropriately heavier gauge, at a different tension and feel. It’s a choice about tradeoffs, not a requirement.
06 — Sources
Where these facts come from
- D’Addario — “All About String Tension”www.daddario.com · accessed 4 Aug 2026
- Stringjoy — “Fanned Fret and Multi-Scale Guitars, Explained”stringjoy.com · accessed 4 Aug 2026
- Guitar.com — “Extending the Range: The Essential Guide to Seven-String Guitars”guitar.com · accessed 4 Aug 2026
The Concierge
Weighing a 7-string against just down-tuning your six?
Describe what you’re trying to play and ask the concierge whether you need a new instrument or just a heavier gauge.
Range, and what adding a string costs
Suicidal Tendencies — The Riff Engine
Standard E, the entire time. Nothing is detuned, nothing is extended — the weight is in the riff, the tempo and the arrangement, and the bass goes up into funk leads.
The tuning finding, and how confident I actually am about it
- Best available evidence says Suicidal Tendencies have played in standard E-A-D-G-B-E across their entire history, through Grant Estes, Rocky George, Mike Clark and Dean Pleasants.
- But I want to be honest about the shape of that evidence: I could not find a single interview in which a band guitarist says "we tune standard." What I found instead is a total absence — no gear interview, no equipment database, no forum thread anywhere mentions drop-D, drop-C or any downtuning at any point across forty-three years.
- That absence is itself strong. Guitar culture documents downtuning obsessively; a band that detuned would leave a trail. Treat it as highly probable rather than quote-verified, and flag it if you republish it.
- And it makes them the outlier in this guide, which is the entire reason they're in it. Korn go down two and a half steps and add a string. Borland goes down a step and a half and rebuilds the instrument. Suicidal Tendencies do neither and are not less heavy for it. Their weight comes from riff construction, palm-mute discipline, tempo and arrangement — which is a completely different and much more portable set of things to get right.
1983 — the spoken-word hardcore record
- The debut averages roughly 2:20 a track, and "Institutionalized" at 3:49 is nearly double the album's typical length. That structural outlier status is worth holding onto.
- "Institutionalized" is not sung. Wikipedia: the verses are "not sung, but spoken in a run-on sentence style," with the lead guitar starting subdued and growing more frantic as the narrative escalates. Louder calls it "a distinctive half-spoken, half-shouted approach" building into "a spiralling panic attack of a song."
- The structure is a three-act play, each act ending in institutionalisation, shifting between conversational spoken passages, an ironic sing-song delivery during the social commentary, and manic shouted call-and-response choruses as the tempo accelerates.
- And the origin is a twelve-year-old: Muir — "I got it from this little kid named Howie, who's 12 years old... It was just funny he was saying 'Man, I told my mom to give me a Coke, and she wouldn't give me one.'" Lyrics by Muir; music by bassist Louiche Mayorga.
- It was, per Wikipedia, the first hardcore punk song to get significant MTV airplay. The video featured Jack Nance and Mary Woronov as Muir's parents, with Tom Araya of Slayer in a cameo.
- Credit correction worth carrying: Grant Estes played the guitar on the 1983 debut — a Flying V through a 50-watt Marshall and an Eventide Harmonizer — and left before release. Jon Nelson, who joined afterwards, was erroneously credited in Estes's place on the late-1980s CD pressing, and the error has propagated into databases including, inconsistently, Wikipedia's own band-member list.
Rocky George — the jazz-schooled lead player inside a hardcore band
- On solos being heretical in his own genre: "Even on the first album Suicidal had guitar solos, which was verboten in punk at the time."
- On what turned him: "I liked jazz for a long time" before heavier music, and then — "Robert loaned me the Mahavishnu record, Inner Mounting Flame, and that turned me in a completely different direction."
- And the training is real, not implied. He took eight-finger tapping lessons from Steve Lynch, and studied extensively with Ted Greene, the chord-melody teacher: "chord melody, the whole chordal chemistry thing, chord vocabulary, harmony... I'm still learning from Ted."
- The single most useful fact about his leads: "They were all improv'd." He describes recording a solo, leaving to play ice hockey, coming back, and it being finished. These are first-take improvisations, not composed and drilled thrash leads — and it is audible.
- On tone, which is not a thrash preference at all: "I've always liked the way a clean guitar sounds with a little reverb."
- Gear: Ibanez throughout (a brass-bridge Blazer, later Prestige), Mesa/Boogie amps, and picks that got progressively softer — metal picks to Dunlop Tortex .88mm — with strings creeping from .10–.52 up to .11–.52.
- Mike Clark arrived in 1988 and Wikipedia is explicit that his arrival "gave lead guitarist Rocky George substantially more soloing opportunities" — before that George played everything himself. Clark's self-description is the perfect counterweight: "I'm a simple player and I use just the basics, no frills style of plug in, play and let it rip, and this gear lets my fingers do the talking."
1990 — the funk metal turn, and it arrives with one person
- Lights...Camera...Revolution! is documented as "their first Suicidal Tendencies album to display funk influences," and the shift is attributed directly to Robert Trujillo's arrival. Gold certified; Grammy-nominated for Best Metal Performance, losing to Metallica — the band Trujillo joined thirteen years later.
- "Send Me Your Money" has a funk bassline and two quick bass solos. And here's the detail that matters: the song had been in the live set since 1985 — it predates Trujillo entirely and was rebuilt around his playing for the record. That's a merge recipe in real life.
- "You Can't Bring Me Down" — Rolling Stone: it "builds from brooding, clean-toned arpeggios to furious uptempo shred" and "solidified Suicidal Tendencies' transformation from hyperactive Eighties skate punks to sophisticated Nineties metal act."
- Trujillo on his own method, and it is not imitation: "I wasn't necessarily trying to play Jaco compositions note-for-note. I was more into taking the technique or the feel and creating a song around that." And: "It was about composition — using harmonics, for example, but using them in a song formula. That was how I used the tools he provided."
- On the physical technique: "a lot of fingers, a lot of slapping, but also pick," and "I tend to play hard, maybe harder than most players, so I have fairly strong fingers" — using "the pad of the finger, then a little bit of the presence from the nail," a right-hand approach he credits to his flamenco-guitarist father. The fast slap figures are thumb-hammer-pop and thumb-hammer-hammer-pop combinations driven by wrist rotation.
- And a tone detail specific to this band: "There was a time when Jaco often used a chorused-out sound that was very dynamic and... I did use it quite a bit with Suicidal Tendencies." Chorus on the bass is a documented part of that era's sound.
- Muir pushed him into it. Muir's recollection: "I want you to slap it!" — and, on Trujillo's starting point, "Robert was never into heavy music." It also runs the other way: Wikipedia records that Trujillo is the person who turned Muir on to funk, which is what produced Infectious Grooves.
- Infectious Grooves (1991) ran at equal status to the main band, often touring together and forcing Muir and Trujillo to play two sets a night. Trujillo: "With Infectious Grooves, because I was the main writer, every song we ever did was inspired by Jaco" — and he describes deliberately combining "Slayer riffs with James Brown and Parliament." Ozzy Osbourne guested on "Therapy" because he happened to be recording nearby.
Muir, the drum chair, and where they are now
- The two-band answer that explains the whole catalogue: "The two favorite bands that I thought were brilliant were the Sex Pistols and Parliament." Hardcore and P-Funk, stated by the man himself, which makes the 1983-to-1990 arc a straight line rather than a swerve.
- On refusing categories: "I never tried to fit in, I never labeled myself." And: "With Suicidal, no matter what we do, it's seamless. You don't think, 'That's punk rock, that's metal' — we go side to side."
- On structure, and it is a useful principle: "Records should be like chapters of a book. If you read the same chapter over and over 10 times, that doesn't really make a book, it just makes regurgitation." Plus: "I think that's what music should be, it should be a little bit challenging and a little disjointed."
- R.J. Herrera introduced double-bass technique to the band, which is the mechanical marker of the hardcore-to-metal transition. His own account of the process: "When we came up with new music it just happens, we never set out to write 'metal stuff' or 'punky' stuff."
- Dave Lombardo joined in 2016 explicitly to get away from his own idiom — he wanted to "venture into the crossover scene; implement some funk grooves, get more swing into my playing." On click tracks, which is directly relevant to how this music should feel: heavy quantising produces drummers who are "consistent, but there's no identity, no originality" — and "You can't give a typewriter feelings."
- Eric Moore, on the difference between the two bands' demands: "Infectious allows me to be a lot more free with my licks and how it all comes across, and ST is played like ST" — the main band's grooves are canonical and get played as written.
- The bass chair is a funk pipeline, which nobody says out loud. Trujillo, then Thundercat (Stephen Bruner, in the band from age sixteen in 2002, three albums, before becoming one of the most celebrated jazz-funk bassists alive), and now Tye Trujillo. Jaco to Thundercat runs straight through a hardcore band.
- Now: Muir, Dean Pleasants, Ben Weinman of The Dillinger Escape Plan on rhythm guitar, Tye Trujillo on bass, and Xavier Ware on drums since January 2026 — the fourth drummer change since 2021, after Lombardo, Pertzborn, Nekrutman and Jay Weinberg. "Adrenaline Addict" arrived April 2025, their first new song in six years; a fifteenth album is in progress. They supported Metallica's stadium run from April 2025.
DevilDriver — The Hook Engine
Gothenburg melodic-death top-lines welded to a Californian groove-metal chassis, engineered around the pit. Everything lands on the grid.
Riff architecture
- Two-layer design. A palm-muted open-string gallop on the bottom, a tremolo-picked melodic line on top. The melodic line is the hook — the chug is just the floor.
- Melodic vocabulary: natural minor and harmonic-minor/phrygian-dominant colour, harmonised leads in thirds and octaves. Mike Spreitzer names Björn Gelotte (In Flames) and Jerry Cantrell, and describes writing solos as "a song within a song" — phrasing over shredding.
- Later-era shift (Dealing with Demons, 2020/2023): the band deliberately slowed down and leaned into dissonance — minor and major 2nds, tritones.
- Feel: zero displacement. Hooks are downbeat-locked. This is the exact opposite of Lamb of God and it is the single most important thing to know when merging the two.
Drums
- Double-kick gallop as the default engine. Blast beats used as pure acceleration into a chorus — not as texture.
- Lineage: John Boecklin (2002–14) cited Scott Travis for precision and Joey Jordison for speed/fills. Austin D'Amond (2016–22) brought Chimaira groove weight. Davier Pérez (2022–) is described as "rapid, mechanical, utterly relentless."
- The signature move is the pivot: full-speed double kick → hard half-time stomp exactly at the chorus.
Bass, vocals, form
- Bass: hard pick attack, distorted, locked to root and kick. Not a melodic voice.
- Vocals (Dez Fafara): mid-range bark, no cleans by policy — he's on record dismissing the heavy-verse/melodic-chorus formula as lazy. The phrasing is the tell: syllabic, percussive, on-the-beat, built around a repeated titular phrase. That's Coal Chamber nu-metal cadence DNA plus punk phrasing (he took "Dez" from Black Flag's Dez Cadena). Gang-shout doubles on hooks.
- Form & tempo: 3–4 minute verse-chorus. The debut album averages ~129 BPM across a 91–185 range. Hook lands by 0:45.
- Production: Colin Richardson → Jason Suecof/Andy Sneap → Logan Mader → Mark Lewis. Mesa Dual/Triple Rectifier, Friedman BE-100, 5150, Soldano. Polished, forward mids, radio-tight low end.
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