I have always loved the sound of a 12-string acoustic guitar. For our 40th wedding anniversary my dear wife has kindly bought me a Sigma DR12-28 and it arrived today, nestling snugly in a Hiscox case. (Don't worry, I'm buying her something equally as delectable!).

I shall play the guitar in for a few weeks before taking it over to a favourite luthier who set up my other guitars and those of a good friend of mine. At that time he will strip it right back, chamfer the frets, reset the nut and bridge pieces, check out the truss rod adjustment and generally set it up with a new set of strings to my preference re action, etc.

My question here is: When stringing a 12-string guitar, the octave strings of the E, A, D and G are commonly placed first in their respective pairs, i.e. when looking at the guitar in the playing position the octave string is struck first when stroking a chord downwards.

I'm well aware that Rickenbacker has traditionally departed from this convention by switching the octave strings around, so that the 'normal' strings are struck first. Perhaps being electric this is the key to its unique sound, as played by The Beatles and The Byrds among numerous others down the years.

What might the audible difference be if my twelve was strung the Ricky way rather than the conventional one? Would the sound be fuller and less jangly, perhaps, or totally the opposite?

You're not getting many answers here, well none.

Surely you can find some here?

https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...+string+guitar

Surely ( on acoustic) , the main string would drown out the octave?

Entirely depends on how you're playing. If you're just going to be strumming, I can't imagine it will make much difference at all, you're going to get millisecond differences between main and octave strings being hit, but I really can't see it making an audible difference, as I would imagine all strings being hit at roughly the same force.

If you're doing a lot of sweep or fingerpicking, it may make a difference as it's going to be less uniform and the pick force will concentrate on the string nearest the direction you're travelling at the time, if that makes any sense.

There's tricks to make a 12 string sound a bit fuller and less jangly, I always used to ever so slightly detune the octave strings from the 12th fret of the regular strings, so there's some slight frequency beating, and this made it sound a little fuller. Similar effect to detuning oscillators on a synthesiser by a couple of cents.

Thanks, I've looked through many of these. I wonder if Rickenbacker just did it their way at the outset and never bothered to change it.


Thanks MuTron1, a helpful post from someone who obviously has greater playing skills than I do! Me, I'm a bedroom strummer and struggling finger style novice, but that's what makes me happy and I'm cool with that.

I took my new 12 over to the luthier I've used in the past and he'll work his magic on it by the end of next week. In out-of-the-box condition he felt it was pretty well set up already - at least as well as many top line Martins - with a lower action than he usually sees, but there are a number of tweaks that he'll perform to make it 'just so', notably chamfering the frets and re-cutting the nut and shaving bits off the bridge pegs to even up the spacing.

I asked him about the octave stringing thing and he said that the way it's strung at the moment is the usual way. He conjectured that Rickenbacker, being among the very first to produce a commercially available electric 12-string, just came up with their particular way of doing it and by the time someone noticed the octaves were the 'wrong' way round, the man at the top in charge of the purse strings wasn't prepared to change the tooling in the factory to accommodate normality. Nice thought!