Tenor guitars are four stringed instruments normally made in the shape of a guitar, or sometimes with a lute-like pear shaped body or, more rarely, with a round banjo-like wooden body. They can be acoustic and/or electric and they can come in the form of flat top, archtop, wood-bodied or metal-bodied resonator or solid-bodied instruments. Tenor guitars normally have a scale length (from bridge to nut) of around 23 inches.
Tenor guitars were manufactured continuously by Gibson and Martin from the 1920s until the 1970s. Tenor guitars are usually tuned in fifths (usually CGDA, similar to the tenor banjo or the viola), although other tunings are possible, such as "guitar tuning" or "Chicago tuning" (DGBE), "Irish" or "octave mandolin" tuning (GDAE) and various "open" tunings, for slide playing.
The normal CGDA tuning is very "open" and it gives the instrument unusual voicings from both open and closed chords. The fifths tuning also makes for easy moveable chord shapes. The instrument is equally well suited to both rhythm and lead playing.
Tenor guitars are four stringed instruments normally made in the shape of a guitar, or sometimes with a lute-like pear shaped body or, more rarely, with a round banjo-like wooden body. They can be acoustic and/or electric and they can come in the form of flat top, archtop, wood-bodied or metal-bodied resonator or solid-bodied instruments. Tenor guitars normally have a scale length (from bridge to nut) of around 23 inches.