Light Tone Bar

[Isaac Veal]

Hey y’all I was wondering if anyone knows about any really light tone bars for sale anywhere online? Maybe ones made out of glass? Are there any major downsides to using a tone bar that’s not made of steel? Thanks!

[D. Scheindlin]

If Mark is still making the zirconia tonebars they are worth checking out. Considerably lighter than steel and they sound/play great. “Downsides” is subjective. Lighter isn’t for everyone (turns out it wasn’t for me) and tone is a bit different than steel - not better or worse, but different.

zirctone@gmail.com

[Larry Dering]

I have an aluminum bar and a hardened plastic bar. They sound ok but are so light it requires more hand pressure which tires the hand quickly. There's always a trade off.

[Gene Tani]

Elderly has blue glass ones, never tried one, don't know anything about them but they're really good about answered questions

https://www.elderly.com/collections/bullet-bar

There's also rocky mountain slides, which i also don't know much about

[Brett Day]

Basil Henriques makes a bar called the Ezzee Slide bar and he makes them in different sizes. I use one to play pedal steel because of cerebral palsy and it's my best and favorite bar to use

[Bobby D. Jones]

If you are now using a steel bar, And it has more weight than you are comfortable with. Drilling out your present bar is another option.
It takes a lathe to drill a bar out. And copper strips to protect the bar finish.

When I left S10 string and went to S12Uni. A 1" X 3 3/4" 11.5oz. bar came with the guitar. The bar fit my hand better than my 10 string bar, But just was to heavy for good control.
I chucked it in a lathe, And drilled a 1/4" hole 3 3/8" deep in bar. As I drilled the hole bigger with each pass of a larger bit. I removed it from lathe, handled the bar and weighed it. With a 31/64" hole, The bar weighs 9.7oz. Enough weight so no extra down pressure is needed, But the 1.8oz of weight loss, Makes the bar handle very well.

Good Luck and Happy Steelin. edit drill to 31/64"

[Donny Hinson]

Generally, tone bars can be made lighter in 3 ways: They can be made of alternate materials, they can be made smaller, or they can be made hollow. Usually, a lighter tone bar means some loss of sustain, or that you might have to add more down-pressure to aid sustain and insure no rattling or buzzing of the strings. How much sustain you lose depends on the material and the amount of mass. In some cases, a loss of sustain can be a desirable quality. It's all personal taste.

[J D Sauser]

weight... (MASS) will inevitably affect tone. Think of recoil on a light vs. a heavier gun.
Glass bars, besides a common option for guitar-slide players, have existed and never made it past some "novelty" thingy that would end up collecting dust pretty quickly. They don't seem to sound convincing.

Adherence. Glass, while it is not scratched, has little adherence to metal, so it's slippery.
Chrome and polished stainless steel, has quite some adherence.
The Cyrconia "stone" bars (which are for the seme size noticeably lighter than quality "steel" bars like the BJS bar) have less than metal on metal adherence, but still sound very good.

Steel player feel "adherence" as "drag" sliding up and down the strings. Interestingly bars with more drag/adherence tend to generate more bar-buzz.
Some adherence however can further better sustain as the is less string vibration eating up energy behind the bar's tangent (string-"touching")-point.

While I am "sold" on the CircoBars, I feel that I tend to compensate more for the lacking mass, with my hand and thus have more "pain" after extended practice, than I would when using the same size but heavier BJS steel bar... especially when I work on breaking new limits and thus am tenser than desirable.