Re: [tuning] Microtonal Refretting

> It might amaze you (or perhaps it might not!) how little guitar
manufacturers
> know about tuning. Epiphone guitars, at least while I was in college, I
found
> to be dreadfully out-of-tune with themselves, for example. Luthiers'
> Merchantile sells fretting charts so that makers don't have to do any
> calculations. Some of them don't know what the calculations are. A few
even
> still stick with "the rule of the 18th," which basically estimates the
twelfth
> root of 2 to be 18/17. That's a pretty good estimate for a half step
alone, but
> the error really adds up quickly when you apply it repeatedly.

As a newbie here I thought I'd lurk for a while, but I might add something
here. I have a friend who is a guitar maker and some time ago he did some
tweaks on a guitar of mine.

There are a couple of ways to retune the frets of guitar--in fact the whole
issue of building a guitar to be in tune is a deep subject. But as far as
the frets are concerned there is a device called a fret file which is
designed to remove metal from the frets and still preserve the "roundness"
of the fret. Between the file and special wide fret wire, you can move the
placement a small amount and tune that location to the proper position.

This is a VERY tedious process and unless you're willing to pay a lot of
money, or learn to do it your self, not something the average player would
want to get involved with.

The discussion of this is probably beyond the topic of this list, except to
say that most custom guitar makers would be happy to add frets to a guitar,
if you've got enough cash. You might have to be willing to work with the
builder over an extended period of time to get it right.

Paul

Gary Morrison wrote,

>A few even
>still stick with "the rule of the 18th," which basically estimates the
twelfth
>root of 2 to be 18/17. That's a pretty good estimate for a half step
alone, but
>the error really adds up quickly when you apply it repeatedly.

>The most common mistake though is not applying a bridge correction -
pushing the
>bridge slightly away from the nut to compensate for the fact that the
bridge is
>higher than the nut. That causes higher frets to have higher tension than
the
>lower frets, and pushing the bridge back makes compensates for that by
giving
>those higher frets a greater percentage lengthening than the lower ones.

This bridge correction will go a long way in correcting the errors
compounded from using the "rule of the 18th", making the latter quite useful
in practice.