Animals as Leaders guitarist Tosin Abasi has reflected on the early days of eight-string guitars, highlighting their initial limitations and how they primarily catered to heavy music.
While extended-range guitars have existed for decades, they were rare and mostly custom-built. Apart from the rise of seven-string guitars in the 1990s, most extended-range instruments remained out of reach for the average guitarist. It wasn’t until the late 2000s and early 2010s that eight-string guitars became more commercially available, with Animals as Leaders playing a major role in their mainstream adoption.
However, in a recent interview with Guitar World, Tosin discussed the downsides of these early models. Reflecting on his journey and the launch of Abasi Concepts, his own guitar brand, he explained:
“When I started playing eight-string specifically, I realized that there weren’t a lot of options from the traditional big brands and manufacturers because, at that time, the eight-string was a very novel guitar.”
This lack of variety led Tosin to explore custom builds that would improve playability and design. He continued:
“So the guitar design was more of me being like, ‘Well, I’m playing an instrument that seems under-served as far as options [go],’ and I basically commissioned a custom guitar for myself with eight strings. That was the first sort of ground-up design: it was to solve problems I found on existing eight-strings that basically just felt like you took a six-string guitar and added more strings.”
Beyond structural adjustments, eight-string guitars also had another major issue—they were designed with a narrow focus on heavy, low-register playing.
“There was another issue with a lot of the eight-strings,” Tosin added. “It seemed as if they catered towards only playing really heavy music in the lower register, and I was someone who wanted to do a lot of chordal stuff and a lot of lead guitar.”
To address these limitations, Tosin introduced radical design changes, including multi-scale fretboards, ergonomic body shapes, and refined neck profiles, making the instrument more versatile and accessible. Reflecting on this evolution, he concluded:
“So there were features like the multi-scale and the actual shape of the body and the neck profiles that I wanted, to [make it] really easy to play even though it had more strings than you were used to. That’s where the design part actually came in.”
Tosin Abasi’s innovations have since pushed the boundaries of electric guitar design, proving that eight-string guitars can be far more than just a tool for heavy music.
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