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I don’t know nothing about electric guitars Miss Scarlet.
I remember Malmsteen Mango brain carved the space between frets deeper, they say scalloped. That removed mass from the neck.
My conclusion is that ( electric guitars are a different animal than classical guitars and can’t really be compared) the reason classical guitar necks are a certain size is because it was arrived at over generations of trial and success and the successful ones were noted. We arrive at a window of performance or common size that everyone knows. Outside of that ‘strike zone’ there are diminishing returns on both directions, too thin or too beefy. So we know the Goldilocks Paradigm of Neck Meat.
In guitar porn stiffness and mass are crucial for proper vibrations, but it’s nuanced game. The part that makes me grumpy sometimes are the commenters that don’t trust the generational recieved knowledge and try to backwards engineer the guitar by quantifying the physics of it. All you have to do is follow the dimension of the guys who were building in mid 20th century and you come out fine.
Ricardo, you should ask Richard to carve 37 grams out of the Montoya neck and change to lighter tuners and see what he says.
Ricardo, you should ask Richard to carve 37 grams out of the Montoya neck and change to lighter tuners and see what he says.
Yes, good idea. After all, he can always just glue the carvings back on if the sound gets worse.
About Malmsteen fret carving: despite his ridiculous insistence that he was NOT influenced by the likes of Strat neck carvers like Blackmore and Uli Jon Roth (his obvious influences for performance), or even Mclaughlin who did it to Gibson and acoustic guitars (Malmsteen even owns a "skakti-esque guitar with sympathetic strings, in addition to using Mclaughlin scale patterns note for note), he claims as a teenager he worked in a luthier shop in Sweden and got the idea from a Baroque era Lute that had scallops instead of fret wire ties. Based on what I know now that just seems outrageous for polyphonic music and tone....he claimed only the wood peaks stopped the string.
Regardless of the inspiration for his own fret carving on Strats, are there any extant examples of Lutes with scalloped necks???
ORIGINAL: Ricardo Regardless of the inspiration for his own fret carving on Strats, are there any extant examples of Lutes with scalloped necks???
I doubt we would see one that came out of the mainstream tradition (but that's easy to say because there just aren't that many that survived). On the other hand weird outliers and hybrids (old lutes later converted to wire strings, etc.) show up occasionally although their genesis takes an expert to puzzle out (conversion? folk instrument? counterfeit built for tourists?).
The wire-strung instruments, citterns and orpharions, were the ones with scalloping between the brass frets.
ORIGINAL: Ricardo Regardless of the inspiration for his own fret carving on Strats, are there any extant examples of Lutes with scalloped necks???
I doubt we would see one that came out of the mainstream tradition (but that's easy to say because there just aren't that many that survived). On the other hand weird outliers and hybrids (old lutes later converted to wire strings, etc.) show up occasionally although their genesis takes an expert to puzzle out (conversion? folk instrument? counterfeit built for tourists?).
The wire-strung instruments, citterns and orpharions, were the ones with scalloping between the brass frets.
Yeah, I think ‘Ol Mangosteen was looking at a German guitar lute from the late 19th early twentieth century or an instrument like a cittern. Why would a historical lute be in a repair shop?
This is a neck from a 1930’s German Lute Guitar. They often scooped finger boards
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Aside from all this Malmsteen chat, how is the guitar now? Has it defrosted into a more pleasing dinner?
I let it sit in the case for a few days and played my other guitar, but took it out last night. I’m not sure if I like it or not, but it isn’t a bad guitar. It’s slightly on the overtone spectrum more than I like under my ear, but this isn’t present out front in a bad way.
This weekend I’m going to have my friend play it, he’s quite good. I’ll know more then. I know if the top were spruce that I’ve been using it would sound more to my liking, but this cedar might need a slightly different approach. I’d not hesitate to put it in the market it’s sellable, but it might not be The guitar for me. But for now I’m keeping because the bass is very rich and it really adds to the bottom end of the sound of our guitar ensemble. I play a lot of the bass end parts because I lead the bass section in most peices we play. Our group has four advanced players and eight intermediate players and the advanced players each lead a section.
A professional guitarist could give a concert on this guitar, but it ultimately might not be ‘my’ personal guitar. It’s going to take a few months for me to figure it out.
I feel a bit sad about that, but I expect you have applied a suitable rationale. And I imagine your next guitar build for yourself will be much more to your liking. It takes a lot of b0llocks to experiment like this given the amount of work involved. Salud!
Not bad at all. The wood looks very cool and different. I prefer a brighter treble, but it might be the bridge which is not rosewood…I could be wrong but a lot of the brightness I like I mentally associate with the hard brittle Rosewood. That is only because I felt certain guitars with other bridge types seemed a bit wooly to me. Who knows.
It might be the recording but it seems very prominent in the midrange, I really like the sound of the basses; the trebles, like Ricardo said are not very bright, but I guess that's what you were going for.
I get a feeling of a quite dark, old time sound, it has charm. I could get into that sound.
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