On Headless, Fretless and Extended Range Guitars and Basses

I've just become aware that we have separate tags for headless guitars and headless bass guitars, headless guitars and basses are rather rare so it seems a little excessive to have a tag for both of them, the same line of reasoning could also apply to fretless guitars and fretless bass guitars but perhaps there's more merit to that case since it's not uncommon for artists to forgo drawing frets for simplicity's sake.

Then there's also the several tags for various extended ranged guitars and basses, I think it's silly to have tags for 5, 6, 7 , 8 (...) etc tags for what all amounts to what I think can simply be classified as extended range guitars.

BUR #41652 has been rejected.

create alias headless_bass_guitar -> headless_guitar

Option 1 for headless guitars / basses.

BUR #41653 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

create alias headless_bass_guitar -> headless_instrument
create alias headless_guitar -> headless_instrument

Alternatively.

BUR #41654 has been rejected.

create alias fretless_bass_guitar -> fretless_guitar

A vote to see if this should be merged.

BUR #41655 has been rejected.

create alias 7-string_guitar -> extended_range_guitar
create alias 8-string_guitar -> extended_range_guitar
create alias 5-string_bass_guitar -> extended_range_guitar
create alias 6-string_bass_guitar -> extended_range_guitar

A vote to merge all the various stringed guitars and basses into a single tag, I think having a separate extended_range_bass may be not needed since this is also a case of a tag being so uncommon that searching "extended_range_guitar -guitar" should work.

BUR #41656 has been rejected.

create alias 7-string_guitar -> extended_range_guitar
create alias 8-string_guitar -> extended_range_guitar
create alias 5-string_bass_guitar -> extended_range_bass_guitar
create alias 6-string_bass_guitar -> extended_range_bass_guitar

And finally an alternative should we want to keep both.

Fretless basses are fairly common IRL and in artworks so I would keep that tag separate from guitar, even though both are commonly used when an artist simply didn't bother drawing the frets. An umbrella tag for headless string instruments seems reasonable. As for extended range tags, I'd prefer to keep guitar and bass separate to avoid mistags and potential future implication of extended_range_guitar -> guitar on bass_guitar posts. An umbrella tag with a different name would work fine but so would leaving things as is.

Re: headless- and fretless, I think it's fine to make an umbrella tag for those, since they can just be further filtered by the respective instrument tags.

I don't see value in significantly reducing tagging granularity with the extended range guitars though. They're not subjective concepts in the slightest, and should be pretty low maintenance cost since it's literally just a matter of counting the strings. I would like to see and implication for them all to extended_range_guitar, though.

BUR #41658 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

create implication 7-string_guitar -> extended_range_guitar
create implication 8-string_guitar -> extended_range_guitar
create implication extended_range_guitar -> guitar
create implication 5-string_bass_guitar -> extended_range_bass_guitar
create implication 6-string_bass_guitar -> extended_range_bass_guitar
create implication extended_range_bass_guitar -> bass_guitar

Option to imply both to keep granularity and avoid guitar / bass mistags as mentioned above.

If we want to avoid excessive tags I think having them all just imply extended range guitar would be fine as well, since the other tags already provide extra filtering.

Definitely opposed to merging 5-string and 6-string basses. A 4-string is standard. A 5-string is not standard, but they're common enough that most guitar shops will have them and plenty of pros use them. A 6-string is quite rare and closer to being a novelty. More than 6 is a joke. They're different enough that there's no reason to merge them. I kinda like ANON TOKYO's suggestion to minimize new umbrella tags.

Since the site has recently tended to move towards the direction of creating separate tags for bass guitars, I don't think we should be reversing that and merging them together. I'm fine with headless_instrument since as you said they're very rare. Fretless basses, as Uselessful pointed out, are far more common IRL than fretless guitars so I think they shouldn't be merged.

BUR #41660 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

create implication fretless_bass_guitar -> fretless_instrument
create implication fretless_guitar -> fretless_instrument

alternative suggestion on how to deal with fretless

CoreMack said:

BUR #41660 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

create implication fretless_bass_guitar -> fretless_instrument
create implication fretless_guitar -> fretless_instrument

alternative suggestion on how to deal with fretless

The name of the tag makes it sound like instruments of the violin family or the oud would fall under that category wouldn't it?

theproclaimers said:

The name of the tag makes it sound like instruments of the violin family or the oud would fall under that category wouldn't it?

That's a very good point, actually. It's ambiguous with other string instruments that are inherently fretless.

I'm not sure what other name the umbrella tag might have.

theproclaimers said:

The name of the tag makes it sound like instruments of the violin family or the oud would fall under that category wouldn't it?

While that's true, part of me wants to say "obviously it doesnt apply to instruments that generally have no frets anyway". I know our users have a tendency to ruin things like this, but at the same time things like no eyewear and no ahoge manage to exist (not sure how much I like the sound of no frets though)

ANON_TOKYO said:

While that's true, part of me wants to say "obviously it doesnt apply to instruments that generally have no frets anyway". I know our users have a tendency to ruin things like this, but at the same time things like no eyewear and no ahoge manage to exist (not sure how much I like the sound of no frets though)

I think in this case it's even less obvious than usual with that sort of tag, since IRL people will actually say "fretless instruments" and mean something roughly like "string instruments other than guitars." Can always be fixed with gardening, but still...

CoreMack said:

I think in this case it's even less obvious than usual with that sort of tag, since IRL people will actually say "fretless instruments" and mean something roughly like "string instruments other than guitars." Can always be fixed with gardening, but still...

That's true actually, in this case it's slightly different because we're also dealing with terminology people use it in the real world. In that case, I'm still not opposed to call it all fretless guitar, and letting the other tags do the sorting.

My two cents after my instrument tagging experience (and as a musician myself):

There's a balance of simplicity and distinguishing to be employed and taken into consideration here. If you're too specific or descriptive with an instrument you're just going to confuse taggers who think an extended-range guitar is a different instrument from a guitar for example, but if it goes the other way we will just fall back to some of the original tagging issues with the classic "bass_guitar being tagged as guitar/electric_guitar" oopsie as a prime example of that.
If there is enough justification to add these tags within the general tagging userbase then so be it, but if they're added without enough justification it's just going to clutter and confuse people that don't have at least part of this knowledge, as helpful as it may seem at face value. Sure you and I probably know very well that a 7-string guitar is still a guitar like the others, but we have to take into account that not all of us share the same level of knowledge on the same front. The most blatant example of this situation taken to an extreme is the military equipment/weaponry tagging issues where an unhealthy amount of users think they're helping us out by being stupidly anal and specific about the caliber of a cannon or the oddly specific manufacturer name of a very specific assault rifle.

Sure I have my own opinions about current stringed-instrument tagging as of now, like not being in favour of fender_stratocaster instead of simply stratocaster, which would make things much easier in my opinion, but I haven't studied the balance and value of these changes enough to contest these changes on my own. I learned to cut back on unnecessary information on some instrument wikis, for the sake of tagging efficiency.

I agree with your point about the military and weapon equipment being overly anal, but at the same time the people who care about that do a good enough job to garden it. It's not unlike the insane amounts of vtuber costumes: usually you can just add the base tag and someone will add the orrect costume tag within minutes.

I think these instruments fall way below that though. The main source of confusion I'd expect is bass guitar vs electric guitar, but that's kind of inevitable based on how they're named. Beyond that, if someone takes even a cursory glance at the wikis, they should be able to figure out that it mainly comes down to counting the strings, something which is trivial and doesn't require that much contextual knowledge. Yes, there will still be some upkeep required, but these tags don't get a massively high volume of posts anyway, so I don't see that causing issues.