When the guitar is enough.

Matteo Mancuso is the Sicilian virtuoso widely called one of the finest guitarists alive. He plays without a pick, a fluid fingerstyle technique that rewired what the instrument can do and made him one of the most talked-about guitarists in the world. The absence of a pick is not a gimmick: it lets him move between chords, bass notes and blindingly fast single-line runs in one continuous motion, which is exactly the kind of playing a baritone's wide range rewards.

On the Bacci baritone his lines gain body and vocal weight low down, while every note stays articulate. In his own words, when he plays it, he does not really miss the bass player. A single guitar, in his hands, covers ground that usually takes two instruments.

This article is about why he plays it: the solo that put a Bacci baritone in front of a global guitar audience, the two instruments he uses, and what a baritone actually offers a player working at the edge of the instrument.

At NAMM, Mancuso's virtuosic homage to Paul Gilbert, the performance known as Paul Position, was played from start to finish on a Bacci baritone. Guitar World named it the number one guitar solo of 2024, ahead of every other spectacular solo in that year's rundown.

It is the clearest proof of the instrument's range in the right hands: a single guitar carrying a solo that needs the top of the register and the body underneath it at once, phrased with a vocal weight low down that a standard guitar cannot reach. For a workshop the size of Bacci, it was a moment that put the baritone, and the maker, in front of the whole guitar world.

Mancuso plays two Bacci baritones, and the pair says a lot about the instrument's range. The Officina Radiance Celeste is elegant and articulate, voiced for clarity across the register and finished in an iridescent blue that shifts in the light. The Art of Nature Respiro Olivo is a hollow baritone in bare Italian olive, warm and singing, the wood left on show rather than painted.

One is a sleek, modern electric voice, the other an airy, resonant hollow one, and both are handbuilt in Tuscany to a virtuoso's spec. Both carry the same idea that runs through every Bacci: only what is necessary, built around the sound.

Across NAMM 2023 and 2024 the Bacci booth became a stage. Mancuso jammed with Cory Wong, traded lines with Tomo Fujita and Adam Miller, and played alongside his brother Vincenzo, and the clips travelled: millions of views, a booth people queued to reach, standards like Sunny and All Blues played on a baritone most of the audience had never seen before.

It is how a small Tuscan workshop ended up in front of a global guitar audience: not through advertising, but through the instrument doing something nobody expected a baritone to do, in the hands of players at the very top of the craft.

A baritone is a guitar with a longer scale, tuned lower, played exactly like a standard guitar but living in a deeper register between guitar and bass. You lose nothing you already know, the chord shapes and technique carry straight over, and you gain a register that lets a line carry its own low end.

For modern jazz and fusion that is a quiet revolution: harmony with a foundation underneath it, phrasing that breathes below the guitar, without a second instrument in the room. It is the case Mancuso makes every time he plays one, and he is not alone. Bruno's baritones have been inspiring a whole generation of top players, Cory Wong, Mark Lettieri and Matteo Mancuso among them, each helping write a new musical canon.