Dan's Concert Nylon Neck Completed

I've completed assembling and shaping the neck for Dan's Italian Spruce and Indian Rosewood Concert Nylon Crossover. As you may notice, the nut and frets are proportionally slanted so that the scale length for the bass strings is slightly longer than the scale length for the treble strings. This is commonly called "fan fretting" or multi-scale geometry. If you look inside a piano you will see that the bass strings are dramatically longer than the treble strings in order to produce better sustain and improve the enharmonicity between the bass string's fundamental and its overtone series. On a guitar it's not ergonomically feasible to have bass strings that are dramatically longer than the trebles, but the multi-scale geometry is a small nod to the same design prinicple. Of course I'm happy to accommodate my customerers' special requests when it comes to neck dimensions. In this case, Dan has chosen to go with what I generally have in mind for the crossover guitar, which is designed to provide the benefits of classical tone with a feel that is more familiar to steel string players. The width of the fingerboard at the nut is 1&7/8", which is a bit wider than the standard 1&3/4" measurement that is most common on a steel string guitar, but not as wide as you expect to find on a traditional classical guitar, 2&1/16". The extra width is useful for three reasons. First, the nylon strings are slightly wider, so more space between the strings is useful to avoid unintentional muting of neighboring strings by the left hand. Also, because of the reduced tension of nylon strings, they require a higher action in order to avoid buzzing. Accordingly, the strings must be pressed down a little bit further to fret them, and this also makes the wider spacing helpful to avoid unintentional muting. Third, the reduced tension of the strings makes it so that a little more margin between the outer strings and the edge of the fingerboard is helpful against a player inadvertantly pulling a string off the edge of the fingerboard. Classical guitars offer dramatically more margin here than steel string guitars. This is not a concern on the first few frets, where the string is laterally anchored by the nut slot, but it does matter at the higher frets. So I provide a wide string spacing at the nut, with a smaller margin than you might find on a classical, but toward the higher frets, the neck on my crossovers flares a bit more than you find on many steel strings to provide that extra margin. Additionally, and very inmportantly, I'll make the profile of the back of the neck round and slim, with very soft shoulders, such as you'd find on a steel string guitar (unless of course my customer has a different specification). I feel that this design is generallly the best formulation for providing optimal nylon string playability as well as a feeling that steel string players really appreciate. Merry Christmas! :)