Official Luthiers Forum!

Found this forum last night and I must say that there's a ton of info here and thanks so much to all the knowledgeable people here.
All of 12 hours ago I sat watching at video on YouTube of Andy McKee playing some tunes from his latest album (highly recommend listing to this guy). I was, at first, severely confused as to the angle of his frets, and proceeded to do some quick googling. Kind of one of those "what the ...... wait.... ahhhhh .... holy cow that’s cool...." moments.
I've played guitar for 11 years now and admittedly still don’t know more than I did 10 years ago. I own 4 guitars and a bass and yet don’t play as often as I should. I desire to learn and play more in the coming years. I’ve always accepted the parallel fret guitars and never thought of the intonation issues inherently flawing this design. While it's really close it's amazing one can get the tones even more precise with the multi scale fanned design. After reading and better understanding intonation and this truly not so new concept of fanned frets I have decided to peruse building my 7 year old box-o-parts and ditch the current parallel finger board, bridge and nut I had purchased.
Current parts list off the top of my head...
Alder body, quilted koa veneer, teak and maple boards for the neck*, double rod truss rod, carvin a/p electricals and essential wiring and shielding, battery harness and door, knobs, jack, 22 pole double humbucker alnico pickups, bridge**, string ferrules, strap pins, neck screws w/ ferrules, tuning machines, fret wire, nut***, string trees, inlay dots, and the aforementioned fingerboard hmmmmmm hope I didn't forget anything....
* planning to laminate the woods together to add strength and a cool look
** I’ll address this later but would I still need this or a different bridge?
*** definitely going to need a new one and probably make it custom
Total cost so far is just over $500 plus strings.
The point of this thread is to offer my findings of the last few hours and contrast those with your years of experience and knowledge. This will my first ever guitar build and I’m truly wanting to employ a fanned fret fingerboard. Is this wise or a foolish attempt? Through my research last night and this morning I’m looking into the 24.5-26 scale or even 25.0-26.625 scale. I’m 6’4 230 and not with small hands. Playing on my strat and my applause is not totally cramped but it would be nice for a hair bigger frets. I’ve settled on 7th fret straight as a relatively comfortable angle and others here have suggested.
Current compensation on my guitars is about ¼ in or there abouts. I think the scales I mentioned above may be fairly close to what is going to be needed. After reading the relatively simple how to linked on the Novax website I feel comfortable with cutting my fret slots by hand. I’ll just need to purchase a blank radiused fingerboard and fret saw. This shouldn’t be too hard to get and cost won’t be an issue with selling my current board. This brings me to think about the bridge and assuming the standard bridge probably won’t cut it. That too will most likely be for sale too along with the nut.
I may be able to sneak by with the current bridge. It looks like I can get about a ½ in of adjustment out of the retainers but will this be enough? If not are there specific bridges for this and also where can I purchase a long enough nut? All my previous parts came from stew-mac and carvin but I know there’s LMI and probably many others but who sells these parts.
I’ll keep you guys apprised of my progress in the coming months. I plan to work on this project over winter and apply finish in the spring. Thanks in advance for your help and guidance as this concept is really new to me and many of you have executed this in your own guitars many more elaborate than I could ever do.

Welcome to the forum!
$500 is what seems to be the cost of parts for me too.
I wouldn't build a fanned fret, unless I tried one out first, and really liked it.
I think it's a lot more work. I've never played one.

well i figured it would be different and not too much harder than a normal fretted setup aside from the angled frets. i have a strat, tele, applause, older nylon strung acoustic yamaha, and a p-bass i'm fluent in the normal fretting but i see the advantages of the multi scale. i'm an amtature woodworker but am quite exacting when necessary. and at the time of purchase i was in a band and playing all the time so i had the drive to do all this. now i'm kinda glad i waited till now

listening to the artists that employ this i can (at least i think i can) hear the harmony of the scales and how they coincide perfectly. i do notice the minor tonal differences in my other guitars now. it's just one of those blind ignorance things not knowing something this cool existed. i dont even know where to start looking to see if i can even touch a fanned fret setup.

I haven't built a fan fret yet, but I am planning it for my next acoustic. The headstock will be one area of difficulty, dealing with the angled nut. Actually, maybe if you do a Fender style flat headstock, it wouldn't be any harder. Next is the bridge. If you're using a pre-made bridge, then rotating it effectively narrows the string spacing a bit. And electric bridges already have very narrow string spacing built in, for my taste. And of course accurately marking and cutting the fret slots themselves will be slightly more complicated. But overall, I don't imagine it being too terribly much more difficult than normal parallel frets.

For the bridge, one option is to get a Wilkinso/Gotoh VS-100N bridge, take the saddles off, and make a new mounting plate that sits flat on the front of the guitar top. If you angle it right and put the through-holes in the right place it should work great. I haven't done this yet, but I have looked at it and it should work. You can even buy just the saddles from Allparts. The other option is to use the individual bridge pieces from Allparts.

http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Bridges,_tailpieces/Electric_guitar_tremolos/Wilkinson_Gotoh_VS-100N_Tremolo.html
http://www.allparts.com/ABM-Single-String-Bridge-Black-p/sb-5500-003.htm
http://www.allparts.com/Graph-Tech-Saddles-p/bp-2338-00g.htm

I did my first and only guitars with fan frets. One easy trick for the nut is to use a zero fret, then the nut goes back to standard. I hand cut with templates from:
http://www.ekips.org/
I was concerned it would be awkward to play, so I did only a small differential. At Healdsburg I got to try some more radical fans, and was surprised how easy it was to play. I played Harry Fleischman's guitar, easily my favorite of what I played there. Even though you will have some more head scratching with multi scale, I think it is worth it because it is rare to be able to buy one, since most keep their first, make something you will want to play.
Rob

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I have a design for a fan fret type neck, and the scales are 25 1/2" on the bass side and 24 3/4" on the treble side and the vertical fret is the 12th. What do you guys use?

First off thanks guys for your replys.

my headstock will be out of some 5-6/4 wood i picked up off my high school wood shop teacher for a buck each. both were rough and i planed them both for s4s. planning on a fender style flat headstock though the end design will definately not look like a fender.


i found the abm's last night and at $35 each i cant make that happen. plus all my hardware is chrome though it wouldn't be too much trouble to get new knobs in black. The humbuckers are black but the tuning machined are chrome. I was hoping to have all the hardware one color.
I’m looking up the others now but I’m leaning more to keeping my current bridge and turning it a few degrees. I have a maximum of ¾ of play in the current bridge. Yet I’ll need a minimum ¾ for intonation. This I’m slightly worried about.

Kinda a quiet site there but I found the page I needed thanks.


Well I don’t think that is far enough apart. Accepted range of delta is 1-1.5 in. youre currently at ¾. Maybe it will work fine and allow you to maintain a lower fret angle acress the board

So, say, 25 1/2" top and 24" bottom? 26" top, 24" bottom?

24 seems short and now youre at a 2in difference which also seems a bit much. i'll let the master luthiers chime in

I have built two multiscale electric guitars - both 8-stringers - one with the "perp" (fret perpendicular to the centerline) at #12 and the other one with the perp at #7. The instrument with #7 perp plays easier, and I think you can't go wrong having the perp fret anywhere #5 to #9.

Both instruments intonated extremely well (using a strobe tuner), and I think it is because I took a lot of time to accurately lay out the scales in CAD (including the final nut and bridge string spacings), printed out the fret layout on a paper template, and used that to saw the slots.

That said - I would not attempt a multiscale for a first instrument. Keep your original hardware and build the straight-fret instrument it was intended for. Being your first, you have a lot to learn and you will make (and have to fix) a lot of mistakes. Better to do it without the complications of a multiscale, then make the leap on your second instrument.

And just angling a stock bridge is a bad idea - if you're going to go to the trouble of making a multi-scale instrument, give it a bridge worthy of the idea.

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The member formerly known as erikbojerik....

i was able to find some answers on another luthier forum about how to make the bridge. i have enough metalwork experience to fabricate that. i know i have to find out what my fret tang size is and purchase the saw and files for the crowning and finishing of the frets. i've found a fret layout program that will help me layout the frets. i think i will stick with the multiscale. outside of layout not much changes.

It's a little early for this announcement, but what the hell. I will have the opportunity to work with Ralph Novak over the next year or so, and will do my best to relay all the information he will allow. I'm planning my own build, as all the guitars with his name on them are built 100% by him. But he's an amazingly generous person, and has offered to help me out where possible. More to come in the future

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Captainate

i purchased the metal for fabricating my bridge, and i used the fret finder linked above. i referenced it against my other guitars and everything seems to line up well. i'll just set the bridge to be at the angle i need and go from there. just need to purchase a blank radiused fretboard and saw and we're in business

I hope you have a plan for how to line up the saw to cut precisely angled slots in a pre-radiused board, cause I sure don't

I'd get a flat one, mark lines on it where the high and low E strings will run, mark each scale's fret positions along the string lines, and then clamp a wood block to the board at the two marks for a fret to serve as a fence to hold the saw blade against. Then do your preferred sequence after that (mine is glue to neck, then radius, then fret).

So, does one lay out the 2 different scales on a tapered, or parallel fretboard?
I guess it wouldn't matter,
but I would guess if it was tapered,
it would be more extreme.
Food for thought?
I still think it would be a lot more work,
and harder to keep the intonation on.
I don't recommend on a first build.

Dang it Alan, you exploded my brain And here I thought I was good at geometric logic thingies like this.

After fiddling with some images, I'm pretty sure taper is correct, and parallel is bad.

On a standard fretboard, the outer strings are actually a bit longer scale length than the centers, due to the taper. But in that case, things seem to work out just fine, regardless of how sharply you cut across the frets. With the multiscale, things get confusing with the interaction of the scale difference and taper.

I think it all works out with no error if you calculate the fret positions along the paths of the outer strings (i.e. with taper included) as described in my last post. Definitely if you lay out the two scales on parallel lines, and then run tapered strings across the resulting fret lines, the fret crossing points drift off from where they should be. But also, with the tapered layout, if you cut across corner to corner, they drift. But as long as you fan out the strings evenly between the outer two that the frets were calculated from, I think you're good.

Here's my image.

For sure - you need to lay out the two outer scales on a tapered board. This means you must know your nut and bridge string spacings before slotting, and not change your mind down the road.

Draw your centerline, then taper the board (don't forget to allow for binding and/or space between the outer strings and the edge of the neck) - then slot.

Best to use a flat board for slotting - cut your slots, then radius, then go back and deepen the slots at the edges by hand if you need to, by pulling in from the edge (you risk chipping the edge of the board if you push out toward the edge on a highly angled slot).

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The member formerly known as erikbojerik....

yep dennis and erik have it right. layout and cutting must be off a precut tapered neck nearest to finished dimentions as possible prior to gluing to the neck.

i found this simple how-to
http://www.doolinguitars.com/articles/novax/
but instead of using only 1/2 in angle i'll be using 1in or better angle stock. this will allow me to cut perpendicular and straight.

Quick rendering of my intentions this winter. The koa on the body is a picture of the veneer I will use. I'm buying two finger board blanks this weekend. I bought the metal to fabricate the bridge. All I need is the nut and aluminum angle stock.
What is the ultimate issue with doing fanned frets for my first guitar build? Outside of the layout and fabricating the saddle what is so different from a standard fretted guitar?
I was able to hold a dingwall bass last night. So stoked for the fanned frets. Though it was only for a minute the bass felt easy to play.

Here's a bridge I designed that uses standard Strat saddles. It's designed for scales of 27" on top and 25" on the bottom, with the vertical fret being the 9th.

I'm not sure if you've seen the dove tail guitar http://www.luthiercom.org/phpBB3/viewto ... 0c956f0944

I'll be fabricatinga bridge similar to that.

Maybe one other issue could be the headstock. If you're going Fender-style you'll have to angle the drop-off parallel to the nut, and probably use string retainers for your plain strings.

If you're going with a tilt-back headstock, you need to watch that any wood between the nut and the tuner doesn't interfere with the string path to the tuner posts.

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The member formerly known as erikbojerik....

I do have string trees. The headstock will be a fender style. My neck stock is 8/4 maple. It will be sufficient angle. Thanks for the sight Erik.

Any info on what differentiates fanned frets from standard frets as far as installation goes?

Just a quick update...

Sunday I mocked up a body out of mdf so I could see the guitar off the paper and bolt it up to the strat neck I have. Also I intend on using the mdf to make the templates for all the necessary routings and cavities. Hers some pics of the "finished" fake body.



Over the weekend I purchased a figured maple top. It sounds cliche I know but you'll see it's far from it.

Better pics when it arrives.

Also bought a figured bubinga fretboard.

Looking forward to seeing the two together and get an idea of the finished product.

Hopefully they look good together.