Wide Neck / Nut Tele Big Lou Large Hands

[Gnobuddy]

Interesting take there Gnobuddy (reply #18).

Guessing games can be fun.

I've also read that radiusing the fretboard was done to make it easier for "children and ladies" to play the guitar.

That makes sense. I do like having some slight curvature there, myself.

Before someone goes to a 1 7/8" nut on a T-style, they should try a 1 3/4". I'm happy with mine.

All my electrics now have 1 3/4" nut widths, with the sole exception of my Squier Standard Strat, which is nominally 1 11/16".

I'm fairly contented with the 1 3/4" width necks. As long as I'm precise with finger placement I can play without buzzes and unwanted muted strings, something that was quite impossible for me on 1 5/8" necks.

But I've never had the chance to play an electric with a 1 7/8" neck, so I don't know if that would feel even better to my hands or not. And I'd really like to find out!

I read in a magazine interview with the late Ronnie Montrose, done not long before his suicide, that he played only 1 7/8" nut width electrics - tried one and loved it so much he stopped playing any other width after that. I think they were made by one Gene Baker whose company was called B3 guitars. Looks like they're still in business (and priced far, far beyond what I would pay for a guitar): http://www.b3guitars.com/

-Gnobuddy

 

[Torres-caster]

Having some interest in wide-necked guitars, I'm bringing this thread back from the "dead".

First off, if you want to see the flattest widest-neck Telecaster ever, see here. Yeah, that's a 52 mm (2.0") nut width with a dead flat fingerboard.

http://www.tdpri.com/forum/tele-hom...st-post-first-tele-classical.html#post6535974

On classical guitars vs electrics, without belaboring this obvious, these are just different musical instruments. (I note with some amusement that the late Andres Segovia said the electric guitar was "an abomination". . .that's pretty close to what Frank Zappa said too!). Yes, if you can play one you can play the other, but there are pretty significant differences in WHAT tends on get played on them, and HOW.

If you're playing primarily with a pick, then narrower string spacing lets you strum across strings faster/easier and skip from string to string easier. Also, if you're playing some style where you need to BEND the strings (eg most rock and blues) you probably want to hang your fretting hand thumb over the top of the neck to exert counterpressure to bend the strings. Unless you have monster hands, having a narrower fingerboard makes playing with thumb over neck easier.

For classical guitar, you need to keep your thumb on the back of the neck to get maximum flexibility in the fretting hand for running fixed barre positions, etc. Thumb over the neck is a technical "no-no", so having a wider fingerboard isn't a DIS-advantage.

If you're playing pure fingerstyle, you need more space near the bridge to get your picking fingers to work. In particular, the right hand technique of classical/flamenco guitar requires wider string spacing. For example, conventional electric guitar string spacing makes it nearly impossible to execute clean tremolos. On top of that, nylon (or historically, catgut) strings are "spongier" than steel and vibrate in wider arcs, requiring both higher action, and a little bit wider string-string spacing to get the notes to sound right.

In terms of historical development, radiused fingerboard is not a new idea. Obviously, cellos and violins all have radiused boards, but Baroque period lutes often had radiused fingerboards too. Without beating this to death, radius makes chording a little easier for the fretting hand, especially full six string type barre chords.

Perhaps I better start learning how to cut my own guitar nuts. It's the cost of the nut-slotting files that's been putting me off!

Obviously, I'm responding to a two year old thread here, but I recently cut some nut slots into a bone blank using an ordinary (ie <$2) needle file. Yeah, a set of proper nut files would have been easier, but the end results seem to be OK.

 

[Frank'n'censed]

Hmmm. I wonder if the neck would fit a standard Tele body, or if it would be too wide.

I know Warmoth makes 1 7/8" necks and the fretboard hangs over the sides in order to maintain a standard neck heel size. USACG, on the other hand, has 1 7/8" necks with a wider heel that requires a matching wider heel slot in the body.

If you can get past the brand thing, Agile also makes wide neck Paul's at an affordable price.

 

[Gnobuddy]

Having some interest in wide-necked guitars, I'm bringing this thread back from the "dead".

I've never really understood the "Don't revive old threads!" proscription. If the discussion is relevant, why not?

First off, if you want to see the flattest widest-neck Telecaster ever, see here. Yeah, that's a 52 mm (2.0") nut width with a dead flat fingerboard.

Interesting, thanks for the pics and links!

I note with some amusement that the late Andres Segovia said the electric guitar was "an abomination". . .

Keep in mind that "electric" had a very different cultural significance back then (and "electronic" probably barely registered at all). Segovia was probably reflexively thinking about Dr. Frankenstein and his unholy experiments with re-animating bits of corpses. An electric guitar? A crudely re-animated corpse of a real guitar? Horrors!

Yes, if you can play one you can play the other, but there are pretty significant differences in WHAT tends on get played on them, and HOW.

Here there is room for much chicken-and-egg discussion. Are electric guitars played the way they usually are today because they have skinny necks? Would there have been more likelihood that people would play them a bit more like classical guitars if the fretboards and string spacing had been wide enough? What about in-between techniques, like the fingerstyle "acoustic guitar" playing of many folk musicians today? (Quotation marks because many of those "acoustic" guitars actually do have onboard electronics, making them electric guitars by a different name...electro-acoustic, in British and European usage.)

To me, an electric guitar with a wider neck offers a great deal of potential: you can do things that would otherwise only be possible on a classical guitar, but you can do them without the biggest limitations of a nylon-string classical guitar: very short sustain, and very limited volume.

In the two years this thread lay moribund, I've acquired two guitars with 1 7/8" neck widths. One is a fingerstyle Takamine Dreadnaught acoustic. The other is a 1 7/8" wide Warmoth neck I installed on my old Squier Standard body.

I have essentially zero classical-guitar playing chops, but I do play fingerstyle stuff on the Takamine, particularly when accompanying my wife's singing. It is such a joy to have enough left-hand finger room to play cleanly without buzzes.

The Warmoth/Squier hybrid, I'm still getting used to. There are some setup, balance, and feel issues I haven't fully sorted out.

If you're playing primarily with a pick, then narrower string spacing lets you strum across strings faster/easier and skip from string to string easier.

To a point - if the strings are too close, I find it hinders any sort of complex picking. For strumming, sure, close is good.

There are some types of picking techniques - like the one used by the amazing Steve Morse - that work best with fairly wide string spacing. He swings his pick in a relatively wide and shallow arc, an arc just barely curved enough to clear adjacent strings on both sides of the string he's picking. It lets him play amazing one-note-per-string lines at tempos the rest of us guitarists can only marvel at.

Unless you have monster hands, having a narrower fingerboard makes playing with thumb over neck easier.

Very true...and hooking the thumb over the neck is a good way to (a) limit your ability to freely reach notes on the 6th string, and (b) give yourself repetitive stress injury (RSI) in the wrists and forearms due to the bent-wrist playing position it encourages.

There are amazing players who play using a thumb hooked over the neck - and in many cases, their left hand technique looks quite awkward. Watching a clip of a young Eric Johnson playing can be a study in contrasts: the effortless wash of lovely cascading notes you hear, and the rather awkward and clumsy-looking left hand positions you see, as a result of his thumb-over-the-neck playing position.

For classical guitar, you need to keep your thumb on the back of the neck to get maximum flexibility in the fretting hand for running fixed barre positions, etc.

I usually try for this with my acoustic and electric guitars too, but still fail now and then due to bad habits formed early in my playing days.

And yes, it helps enormously for all the reasons you mentioned. Most of the guys and gals I play with hook their thumb over the top, and most of them would blanch at the thought of playing a full six-string C# major chord with a barre in first position (C#/F)...something I routinely do when I play, say, Eric Clapton's "Tears In Heaven".

One thing nobody brought up on this thread is the insane tree-trunk-wide necks that many bass guitar players use these days, on their six and seven string basses. To play these, the thumb has to be on the back of the neck, and the headstock has to be high in the traditional classical guitar position. Otherwise there's no way to reach the lower strings, unless you have fingers as long as King Kong's.

Obviously, cellos and violins all have radiused boards, but Baroque period lutes often had radiused fingerboards too.

Thanks for that, didn't know it, filing it away in a corner of my mind now.

Personally I like a radiused board, but a pretty flat one. Somewhere around 14" radius seems to be more than enough for me.

Obviously, I'm responding to a two year old thread here, but I recently cut some nut slots into a bone blank using an ordinary (ie <$2) needle file. Yeah, a set of proper nut files would have been easier, but the end results seem to be OK.

I've obtained usable results with needle files, Exacto miniature precision saws, a hack-saw blade on the widest strings, and welding tip-cleaners. But I wasn't happy about using any of them, because IMHO the results left a lot to be desired.

I still don't have a set of nut-files, but next time I feel the urge to buy a cheap guitar, I may make myself buy a set of nut files instead!

Thanks for your input this old thread!

-Gnobuddy

 

[P Thought]

I'm a 1 3/4" nut man, too. My dread and all my (homebuilt) electrics have necks at that width. I'm done making guitars, don't need any more, but I bought the necks from Warmoth and Musikraft, and I've been very happy with the craftsmanship on both.

When I cut the nut slots for the electrics, I made an imprint of the string spacing on my Takamine dread, and used that to guide the spacing of the strings. It's worked out pretty well.

I've kept one guitar with 1 11/16" nut width, for sentimental reasons. I play it now and then, but I can't play it for long before my hands go numb.

I've found that I most prefer full-depth (generally 1") neck profiles, too, for hand comfort. The "boatneck" profile is my favorite.

 

[skippolony]

There is a guy in the UK who occasionally advertises a converted 7 string guitar with a new recut nut and one of the bridge saddles removed and the remaining ones spaced evenly to get the most out of the wide neck. Thought it might be an interesting idea to anyone who might like to try it.

 

[boris bubbanov]

I've never really understood the "Don't revive old threads!" proscription. If the discussion is relevant, why not?

Well, when the thread contains a lot of posts by dead members, it gives us a bit of a start to see them "posting again". Lots of posts by banned members also revives their participation in a way. What this basically means is our host or one of the mods has to read some or all the thread before deciding what to do next.

But just as importantly, people often "go around" all the most recent posts on a subject, and goes back to the only thread on the subject that "went their way". Whatever disinformation or shadiness it may have contained, now the people who provided better, more insightful and more useful information have to go back and swat the flies down again.

I'm not saying ALL elderly threads are bad. I just ask people to use the TDPRI Advanced Search function and use the most recent thread or threads on the subject. Doubtless there's someone out there whose got a batch of these necks they'd like to sell. They're under strong economic pressure to promote the optimistic threads and overlook the dismayed ones.

 

[el cheapo]

I have average sized hands and short, fat fingers. I also have two guitars that I can play better than anything else because I have no issues with them at all. I don't have to think about anything, I can just play. Both of these guitars (one acoustic and one electric) are 1 and 3/4 inches wide at the nut.

I would love a neck like this on one of my Tele's!

 

[boris bubbanov]

I've ordered two batches (8 necks each) of Tele/Esquire necks from Tommy Rosamond at USACG and went for the 1.720 width at the nut but stayed with the conventional heel. I'm thinking from a layout standpoint you can't really exploit much additional width at the nut unless you also widen the heel and the neck pocket (in the way USACG can do for you).

I think some guys from TDPRI should form a syndicate and mass order some bodies and necks from USACG. Five Guys, with 2 bodies and 2 necks each, ordered en masse, all matching specifications and delivered to the leader of your syndicate, with just the leader coordinating things. You'd be impressed with how much the price could be slashed - just remember, you're missing out though (those of you who are not the leader) in talking to Tommy and learning some serious stuff. Reshape the necks down back home from whoever wanted the deepest ones I guess.

 

[Gnobuddy]

I'm a 1 3/4" nut man, too.
<snip>
I've found that I most prefer full-depth (generally 1") neck profiles, too, for hand comfort. The "boatneck" profile is my favorite.

And there's a whole other topic worthy of discussion!

The Warmoth neck I have on my Squier Standard body has their "boatneck" profile, as well as the 1 3/4" nut width.

When I spend a little time with it, it starts to feel "right" very quickly. But it is sufficiently different from every other guitar neck I play to cause a few challenges going back and forth. Usually I'll flub a few notes here and there before my left hand figures out where everything is on this wider and thicker neck.

If the Warmoth necks weren't so expensive, I'd try one with a slightly thinner profile as well, to see which one I like better.

-Gnobuddy

 

[Gnobuddy]

But just as importantly, people often "go around" all the most recent posts on a subject, and goes back to the only thread on the subject that "went their way". Whatever disinformation or shadiness it may have contained, now the people who provided better, more insightful and more useful information have to go back and swat the flies down again.

Ah. Confirmation bias. Thanks for explaining, that's one of those things that didn't occur to me since I've never moderated a forum.

-Gnobuddy

 

[10thoufirst]

I've always preferred a wider neck and this may come from the fact that my earliest guitars were converted Spanish guitars with the wider neck. Also, the first "real" elactric guitar I was ever allowed to have a go on was a Rickenbacker 330 and I found the nut width on that to be far too tight (at the time).
Fender did, however make wide necks to special order and although the only book I have to hand is the Duchosoir Strat book, it says in there that they made necks with widths varying from 1 1/2" (A) to 1 7/8" (D) with the normal or regular nut width being
1 5/8" (B). The othe width, C, was 1 3/4". My own preference is 1 3/4" but my Teles and Strat are standard width and I have a classical guitar as well, so all told, a bit of a mish-mash!

 

[Gnobuddy]

There is a guy in the UK who occasionally advertises a converted 7 string guitar with a new recut nut and one of the bridge saddles removed and the remaining ones spaced evenly to get the most out of the wide neck. Thought it might be an interesting idea to anyone who might like to try it.

Thanks for sharing. I think that's how the "Big Lou" necks were sourced - they're probably slightly customized seven-string necks, with only six tuner holes and six nut slots. Unfortunately they apparently came from a manufacturer who had never figured out how to position guitar frets.

When I was hunting for wider-neck options, for a while I considered buying a budget seven-string guitar from Rondo Music and re-working it into a six-string. Simply leaving one tuner hole empty would have been easy enough, but when I thought about having to modify, source, or manufacture a wider bridge and pickups as well as the nut, I decided I didn't have enough free time to want to tackle it.

If I had access to a machine shop and a bit more free time, I think I'd give it some serious thought, though.

Transplanting a seven-string neck onto a traditional six-string body would be a bit more of a challenge, because the neck heel is usually quite a bit wider on the seven-string necks. So now you either have to rout the neck pocket wider, or shave the heel width down - without destroying the fairly critical alignment between neck and body.

-Gnobuddy