Rogue LX408 8-String Bass Conversions

A good idea that doesn’t work

Rogue 8-String to 12-String Bass conversions

I acquired two used Rogue 8-string basses, one in the Transparent Black finish and the other in the Natural finish. As these basses were inexpensive, selling new for about $300 and used for quite a bit less, I thought these would be good basses to try to convert to 12-strings.

While the headstock was a bit small to handle 12 tuners, there was plenty of room on the neck and at the nut to accommodate four additional strings, plus the tailpiece looked to be perfect for conversion to a 12. I decided to see if a conversion could be done quickly and easily.

Rogue LX-408 8-string bass in the Natural finish.

The tailpiece on the Rogue LX-408 can easily be adapted to the 12-string bass because it offers several stringing options due to the 16 available holes. It can be used as an 8-hole tailpiece similar to the 8-hole tailpiece used on all Hamer 12’s, with the fundamentals being strung through the larger holes and the octave strings sharing the smaller holes. Or as shown here, the fundamental strings can be run through the body with the 8 octave strings each having their own hole. Or both an octave string and a fundamental string can be run through holes in the body with the other four octave strings anchored in the tailpiece.

The tailpiece of the LX408 has 16 holes for the strings.

Given the limited room on the Rogue headstock, which would not allow for 12 standard tuning machines, straight line tuners were thought to be the perfect option - IF they would work. This type of tuner is commonly found on instruments such as the banjo, plus they have been used on guitars by Gibson and Steinberger.

Straight line tuners similar to those used on Steinberger and Gibson Firebird instruments.

Whether or not this type of tuner would work came down to one question: Are these straight line tuners up to the challenge of handling the string tension inherent in a bass guitar string? The banjo is a low-tension instrument, consequently banjo tuners handle less than half the string tension of the typical bass string. Two types of banjo tuners exist, friction and geared. It was obvious that the friction tuners would never work, they would constantly be slipping well before the strings were ever brought into tune, so I tried the geared tuners on one of the Rogue conversions.

The test on the other Rogue bass was to use the straight line tuners found on Gibson Firebird guitars. I thought that the guitar tuners might be better able to handle the bass string tension load.

New nuts needed to be fabricated to accommodate the 12 strings. Tim Whitehouse at Whitehouse Guitars in San Diego, California made the brass nuts for these conversions. Thanks again, Tim!

Rather than using straight line tuners, it may have been possible to fill the tuner holes on the headstock, drill new holes, use a veneer and lacquer to fix the appearance of the headstock, then use smaller standard style tuning machines. No matter how I positioned the regular tuners I couldn’t keep them from running into each other, plus the entire point of this test was to convert these basses easily and this would have resulted in significantly more work.

There was just enough room on the headstock to insert an additional straight line tuner between the bass and octave tuners in each group. This required the bass tuners to be rotated downwards, which gave the headstock a cool “swept” look that I really like. Two of the bass tuner heads barely cleared the headstock while tuning, making tuning difficult but not impossible.

The tuner heads for the octave strings were more problematic - since the heads were wider than the tuner body, the heads would run into each other while trying to tune. A different, slimmer style of tuner head would be needed to make this work in practice.

Oddly enough, the straight line tuners protruding from the back of the headstock did not cause any difficulties in either a gig bag or case - the headstock fit just fine.

While these problems could have been resolved with a little tweaking, the real problem is that these straight line tuners simply do not work with the tension of bass guitar strings. The geared banjo tuners either froze up or broke before the strings got to tune. The guitar tuners, with considerable difficulty, were able to get the strings to tune for the most part, but quickly slipped out of tune once I started to play.

If octave strings with large ball ends were used and strung through the body, the ferrules on the back would need to be replaced with the larger size in order to keep from snagging on clothing.

It is possible that straight line guitar tuners might work on a short scale 12-string bass. The Rogue LX-408 is a 34” long scale bass, and that extra scale length does increase the tension.

Only the fundamental strings have been run through the body, so the smaller ferrules are not needed.

The bottom line - this was a successful failure. The straight line tuners could be adapted to fit into the space available, but they are just not tough enough for this application, which of course they were never intended for. Until a similar tuning machine designed for long scale basses is developed, their use on a bass guitar simply isn’t a possibility.