http://www.youtube.com/embed/lpNhPR3uY6E
A question every microtonal guitarist has to face is “which tuning do I want, who is going to do the re-fret, how many guitars can I find room for, how much is that re-fret going to cost me and how long will I wait for it to be done? Most microtonal guitarists end up with a bunch of guitars in different tunings. The alternative, guitar synthesizers, are great but they still do not have the same playability as a real guitar even if they can be re-tuned to other tuning systems with relative ease.
What I’ve done here is taken a Fender Squier strat that I had made fretless about a year ago and put on 8″ cable ties. Since where I filled in the 12 equal frets are still visible and everyone knows what 12 equal sounds like I placed the cable ties in 12 equal positioning.
The action had to be raised – but I had the action ridiculously low as a fretless guitar so that is not surprising. While there is some buzzing especially on the high E and B strings the guitar is playable as I demonstrate and is in pretty much in tune without much fuss. If you want to change tuning and the ties can’t be moved to your new position all you have to do is use wire cutters to remove the old ties and install new ties. I purchased a package of 100 ties for less than $4.
Tomorrow I plan to buy 6″ ties from Frys Electronics since those have even less height. When I had the idea at Frys I wasn’t sure how much length was needed for the neck circumference and decided to grab 8″ over the smaller 6” ties.
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