Tom Blackshear -> RE: Elevated Fretboard (Jul. 6 2009 4:43:20)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: aarongreen I understood what you meant in regards to string height. I think things are not quite as set in stone however in regards to what makes a guitar a flamenco guitar. In the end a good flamenco guitar is a guitar that a good flamenco guitarist wants to play. That being said, the strings must be close enough to the top for the golpes and that means in between the soundhole and the bridge. Greg's approach is such that you can achieve this. The main reason people want elevated fretboards is for upper fret access (duh). The Assads were the first ones to really realize the benefits of the elevated design as they were doing a lot of complicated chords, arpeggios and such, above the 12th fret, in many of the pieces they play. Odiar pretty much lives up there all day. I haven't really seen a flamenco guitarist who does that to the same degree so perhaps this is enough to keep the demand for such a thing at a minimum. Aaron,......... Reyes built his flamenco with a raised bridge angle that was developed by raising the neck angle too much and this lifted the string height off the top too much, in my opinion. But it also improves strength/torque of sound, so there would have to be a little compromise done here to make the guitar easier to play. The guitar could be lowered at the upper sound-hole but then this puts everything out of line with the bottom and top of the sound-hole, as you would have to lower the bottom of the sound-hole to make it an even surface. This doesn't necessarily hurt the sound but it does look pretty odd with the bottom half of the sound-hole up a level from the top half. One of the least offending methods I know of is to taper off the upper bout a little from side to side, and then re-graduate the finger-board to be thickner at the 19th fret, like I mentioned earlier. This institutes a higher neck angle to some degree and improves torque. Of course this is not a complete ideal as you would have to lower the top around the bridge to keep the string angle closer to the surface. Does this make sense? :-)
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