Fan fret guitars and New Standard Tuning

[Rubbishplayer]

I have a thread about the history of NST / Crafty tunings here https://www.sevenstring.org/threads...s-tuning-original-vision-and-variants.339243/


Whether multiscale is necessary for NST is a matter of personal taste (for me, not necessary at all). The only way to find out is to tune a monoscale guitar to NST and experiment with the gauges to see if you can become reasonably happy. You might be able to avoid a huge amount of extra time, expense, headache caused by choosing multiscale for your project.

Avoiding multiscale in the past suggests it might be best for you to make an effort to avoid it for NST.


Multiscale doesn't actually make this much difference to the practical pitch range of a guitar, this is an exaggeration made by several posts in this thread. At the most it makes just one more string in fifths a little closer to being practical.

For 7, 8, 9, 10 strings, additional small intervals can be added to the top, as discussed in my thread linked above, this is what the Crafty 7 string guitar and Crafty 8 string tapguitar tunings do.

Thank you kindly for the comprehensive response. When I alluded to "healthy interest" on SSO, it was your thread that I had in mind.

Naturally, I bow to the experience of those who've studied NST longer than I, but that said, while I was impressed with the analysis, I was also struck by the lack of consideration of multiscale. So, just a few thoughts as to why I'm considering multiscale:

1. It is well documented (by Fripp and others) that the final string interval of a minor third is a compromise born out of necessity (i.e. the propensity of the top string to snap, presumably even on the Les Pauls 25.75" scale). And while a 22" scale length might make a high B feasible with reasonable longevity, that would be at the expense of overly heavy gauge strings for the bottom strings, which brings me onto...
2. My experience is that there's an optimum gauge range for each string and that gauge depends on the scale length. Sure, on a PRS's 25" scale, you could easily go from .008 to 0.013 for your top string (and similarly for each other string), but going too far on the bottom strings results in poor tone and intonation. Anyone who has tried to get a 3/4 size Strat to sound good on the lower strings will know this. The advent of 7- and 8-strings has reinforced this lesson: 25.5" scale 7-strings show this limitation as one is always fights either a flappy low B or, going up the gauges, poor tone/intonation. Hence the development of 27" scale guitars and, eventually, multiscale. And while a normally-tuned and scaled 6-string does not suffer this issue, my experiments with NST on 24.75" scale guitars show this issue begins to recur on the bottom strings. Sure, it's manageable, but it is still a compromise.

Thus my thoughts have turned to applying the multiscale approach to NST, initially to optimise tone/intonation, but subsequently to overcome that final minor third hurdle. It seems to me that a multiscale 6 string perhaps with a scale range between 22" and 27" might be worth exploring, in the cause of true pure fifths tuning with better tone across the string range.

And if I am going to learn an entirely new fifths-based tuning, I might as well throw adapting to multiscale into the mix. Indeed, I might even consider going straight to a 7-string instrument.

Of course, what has become clear to me now, through discussing this on SSO is that the guitar to achieve this does not exist: most multiscales seem to start at 25.5" and go up. The optimum range probably starts at around 22".

Looks like I'll have to prototype this myself, given that going to another builder will probably end up prohibitively expensive due the need to trial different scale combinations. But a testbench guitar that could be fitted with different test necks, perhaps with relocatable saddles needn't be pretty - just functional.