Guitar open-string just tuning experiment

I've been searching for a just 5ths tuning for my fretless guitar. Quite frankly, the 5ths comes into the equation because I can most easily hear the beatings in 5ths and octaves. I have much more trouble discerning beatings in 4ths or other intervals - otherwise, I'd love to tune my guitar to all-4ths and be done with it. Dunno if it is because I'm still very new in my education on just intonation.

Having just ended a brief flirtation with the cello, for my first guitar tuning experiment I chose the cello tuning for the lowest lowest four strings: C G D A. Ok, cool, I tune it just like the cello (A tuned to tuner, then tune to just 5ths going down). However for the upper two strings I ran into a problem because I knew the strings would break before I could tune those to high E and B. What do I tune those to? If
I can't tune them in straight 5ths, then I should tune them to octaves of two of the lower 4 strings. That way, I still have a just tuning relationship for my open strings. Cool, so now for my upper two strings, I'll just pick, out of the choices of C, G, D, and A, the notes that would yield the smallest possible interval jumps from the A.
The next higher note after A out of that set of 4 turned out to be C. Cool, so I tuned string 2 until it has zero beating against the lower C. Now what is the next higher note out of [C G D A] after the C? It's the D. So I tune string 1 to a neat, beatless octave of the lower D.

Ok, so I played around with it a bit, then I thought, hey this C G D A C D tuning looks awfully familiar. Well, at least the note names would be, for fans of a certain British guitarist. I would imagine he and his disciples are using 12-ET and not really using just 5ths. In the end, I decided not to use it as the high D string for that tuning requires a gauge too thin to work very well with the built-in Sustainer circuit of my guitar.

I am currently experimenting with D A E D A E (the middle E actually a little higher than the middle D - if tuned to 12 ET, it would be a whole step) and D A D E A E. I like the former because there is a consistency of all-5ths within the lower 3 and upper 3 string groups but having that middle E higher than the middle D is kind of strange when traversing up the strings. The latter tuning also has a certain intervallic symmetry of 5ths-4ths-M2-4ths-5ths but it's not as appealing as the 5ths-5ths-reverseM2-5ths-5ths of the former.

Paolo
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