Official Luthiers Forum!

One can adjust with tuning, compensate the nut, and even make squiggly frets. The latter turned out to be an insult to me! I too have very discerning ears, and looked for solutions. Compensating the nut works great, until you hand over the guitar to someone who plays jazz: fifths, thirds and diminished 9ths, or classical: Majors, minors, sevenths... Being equal, temperament rather than perfect pitch, IE no temperament at all, there is currently no one size fits all.

When I first discovered the staggered frets thing, the one where the frets are bent all over the place to compensate. I thought to myself, gee, I knew that that is what a fretboard should look like, but it is so complicated I am amazed someone finally figured it out, and knew right away, that it would not be easy to do that at home! but I was pleased to see that the company (in England, don't remember much more) had a big bold statement: Perfect pitch finally here, one fingerboard that works for everyone! (remember that part: EVERYONE)

But I spent some time on their site, saw the videos, and everything! Even through the lousy PC speakers I could hear little to no difference. So I switched over to my professional sound card, and ran it through my not insane, but really good 300W amp and $1000 speakers, and finally heard a difference. It did sound quite a bit better.

So I decided I should order one fingerboard, to try it out for myself. When I went to the ordering page I got thrown for a curve. Not only were they expensive enough to wonder if I could mark up a guitar that much, but all of a sudden, the perfect ONE fingerboard for all with squiggly frets turned into 4!! One for rock, one for jazz, another for classical and then one for pop! Hell they did not even consider different tunings!!! But wait theirs more!! It gets worse:

I had to think. Hmmmm. Hmmm.. some more Hmmmmmmmm?!?!??? How would I ever do a fret job for someone if they show up with one of those??? Another 10 minutes later I finally found what they had to say about it: "Any competent luthier should be able to re-level and re-crown the frets down the road when need arises". Are you kidding Me??? I am competent, at least that's what they tell me, so: Re-level, no problem, but re-crowning looks like it would take 35 hours with my equipment, and end up costing around $1600; my Gurian file was not designed for tight curves like that. and run that price by your client. Even an $80,000 Plecking machine would go up in smoke, or flip out and crash!

In the end, in all of my years of playing guitar, I have never felt the need for such accuracy. I start with a digital tuner, sometimes I tweak a tuner a bit mid song, as it does make a difference with the key your in. Mostly though I bend the strings ever so slightly to adjust while playing, and most people who hear the "OFF" probably do to, weather they realise it or not. I have good ears, lots of people do, but lots of people in the grand scheme of things is actually very few in the end, and by the time the note is replaced by another one, any deviation is forgotten, and the music as a whole obscures these inaccuracies.

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If what you see is what you get, then Stevie Wonder ain't got nothin'!