Jacob Collier is a brilliant musician with a rather unusual approach to playing guitar. Now Taylor introduced a Jacob Collier signature guitar with five strings. Tuning D A E A D.
Anderton’s video shows that the guitar sounds pleasant indeed. Is it just a gimmick however? Is there a market for it? Could the same tuning and playability be achieved by removing one string from a six string acoustic and tuning the remaining strings to D A E A D ?
I watched the video this afternoon and wondered the same. I wasn’t sure if it was a standard width neck with bigger gaps between the strings or a slimmer neck
Maybe I’ve been living under a rock but I’ve never heard of Mr Collier… perhaps I have some homework to do. It’s a good looking and sounding instrument but there’s so much I’ve still got to learn about the 6 string variety that I won’t be getting one of these
Nicole
Keef Richards ripped off his E string back in the 60s when using non standard tuning, so it is something that has been around for a while. Maybe not a market for a bespoke 5 string but old Keef made a reasonable career out of it.
He is a jazz musician and maybe best known for playing his audience like an instrument…
Same here. The concept is somewhat intriguing though… does it make playing common chords easier? Gotta draw a fretboard with five strings and the tuning to find out… 
I heard about this somewhere… True. Never paid much attention though 
More research to do…
Save you digging
I got the impression from the Andertons video that if you can play barre chords then this tuning makes life pretty easy (see the bit when Ben is explaining to Lee how to play with that tuning when they swap guitars)
Must have missed that when I searched the transcript for “what was the tuning again?”
@TheMadman_tobyjenner Thanks. I’ll watch the videos tomorrow 
Answering my own question from above, it looks like the 5 string has a standard neck which would mean wider gaps between the strings (this is based on the Andertons website)
I only have one question: why?
That’s a very good question…
I guess Taylor’s motivation might mainly be to capitalize on Collier’s quirkiness and popularity.
The long video below likely sheds some light on other whys. So far I watched only three minutes, but it seems entertaining enough.
