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timoteo -> RE: whats the benefit of 660mm scale compared to 650mm? (May 19 2017 22:20:42)
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How fortunate that the meter was defined (in 1793) in such a way that the ideal scale for an ideal sounding guitar works out to an even number of centimeters. Even more wonderful is how the guitar continued to sound great even after Spanish builders changed their system of units from inches to metric. Fortunately they had been using a scale length of 25.591" prior to the change (the best builders having determined their guitars sounded best at this scale), and miraculously this became 650mm after!
And how fortunate that the guitar sounds best when the tuning is C=256Hz ("scientific pitch"). Those clockmakers of the 16th century sure were prescient when they chose the length of the second so that instruments sound best when the C notes are tuned to a power of two. Even more fortunate is how guitars managed to sound good even while standard tuning varied over the years (with concert pitch A between 400Hz and 450Hz).
How wonderful is it that the Classical Guitar, of all instruments, settled on the scale length most suited to the vast majority of humans, even as the average human height varied up and down by 10cm over the past few hundred years? It's marvellous that the Classical Guitar chose the correct scale, and all those other guitars got it wrong - some full-size electric guitars for example are only 527mm! And some are an enormous 686mm! We all know that it's physiologically impossible to play an electric bass, which has a scale lengths up to 1000mm, and we all know you have to have freakishly tiny Trump™ hands to play an ukulele with a scale of 330mm.
If it's not clear yet, I'm mocking your assertion that 650mm is somehow a magical, preferred scale ideally suited to the instrument and to the average player, and that somehow the scale is the most important number, more important than fretboard width, or neck thickness/shape, or body size (length, width, depth) or action. All these things contribute to how comfortable a guitar is for a specific individual to play, and all of them are more significant that a 1% difference in string length.
Fretboard width, for example is chosen to be 52mm NOT because that is some ideal width, but because that is just the even number of mm close to 2". My guitar is 54mm at the nut - that's 4% wider than "standard", which is HUGE compared to the difference between 650 and 660 scale lengths. You can't believe that a 2mm difference in string spacing at the nut is less important than a fraction of a mm difference in fret spacing, or that 2" just happens to be the best choice for most people.
I agree 100% with @tijeretamiel:
quote:
If possible to choose, I'd always go for the scale which the maker likes the most be it 650mm, 655mm etc.
(Note he says If possible).
I believe guitar makers know what works best for them, and know how to produce a great sounding guitar. If how they build doesn't feel comfortable to you, find another builder, don't commission a guitar with all sorts of changed dimensions then complain that the guitar doesn't sound or feel good. And don't think you can demonstrate that you know better than the builder what dimensions will produce the best guitar. If the builder is willing to accommodate you, then great, but you also have to be willing to take no for an answer if the builder tells you he'd rather not.
The notion that a luthier can build a guitar and NOT know the scale, just happen upon 650mm unconsciously, is ludicrous. There's no way the guitar would intonate properly unless the frets were placed precisely and the saddle was placed precisely - these things don't happen by accident. Even if they're working from jigs most of the time there's going to be variations from guitar to guitar so a craftsman is going to verify this very important number. If he was "incredibly surprised " to find it a different scale, then at best he didn't have much to do with the building of the guitar. Or maybe it was a custom build - someone specifically requested a 650mm even though he doesn't normally build them, then that someone decided not to accept the guitar so it ended up in his special locker for who knows how long.
Still not sure why you reopened a >10 year old thread for this, but every person commenting on this thread is pretty much telling you the same thing ...
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