Guitars and Innovation...

On the sillier end of things there is the Evertune bridge, which is the most brilliant guitar hardware design that I will never, ever put on any guitar.

There are some good pieces of software for tap tuning and grading acoustic tops. In manufacturing, it is more to make a more predictable guitar, but it has a lot of promise. Breedlove is doing work with it right now.


I'd love to see the Roland GK revisited. Very cool, excellent idea, lots of applications... but, it designed (roughly) when you were getting AOL floppy disks in the mail. I'm sure something better could be done, now.

The only true innovation (to my way of thinking) in pure guitar design over the last ~70 years since the introduction of the electric guitar is the multi-scale fan fret concept. Originally appearing on acoustic instruments in the 1600s, this is not a new idea, but it never gained traction until it was revived by Starrett and Novak.

All other new "guitar" technologies are simply pairing the nuts-n-bolts concept of the guitar with something else, e.g., digital sound modeling, MIDI control of a synth, and features and gadgets attached to the basic form of a guitar, which is a stick with strings and a fingerboard.

If a maker can find a cheap and effective way to make pickup swapping a simple matter, that may be the Next Big Thing in guitar tech. I had a thread on this last year on the FDP. It could be something big...but right now it's a bit too expensive for the guitar-buying public.

How 'bout the Parker Fly? I once played one for a few minutes in a store many years ago. Super light, for sure. But I don't remember anything that really turned me on about it. I guess it would be interesting to play one for an extended time to really know. Anybody been there?

Meh, anything after the 5 way switch and RWRP middle pickup is a solution looking for a problem. 😜

Brian May did that with his Red Special, and he even took it a step further: he incorporated a phase switch on each pickup. In basic electronic terms, it's wired like a Fender Mustang but has three pickups instead of two.

In 1983, Fender issued the Stratocaster Elite.  It had no lever switch.  Instead, it had a latching pushbutton for each pickup to turn it on and off.  You could have all three pickups on if you liked.  Guitar players pretty much ran the other way screaming, and the Elite was gone from the catalog two years later.

I went down the road of toggle switches offering all kinds of options on a Strat. In the end I found no use for the added options. I'm almost there (again) with the Tele 4 way switch; cool option I almost never use and the aesthetic of the neck pickup not being full forward causes my little neurotic brain to twitch a little. I'm no purist, but I've done this long enough to be good with the meat and potato offerings of traditional configurations on most guitars.

Presenting the Gyrock.

Here


Only $16,000 dollars!


Here

So, what about Fender's bolt-on necks vs. Gibson and everybody else's glued-in set necks? What do the experts say about this, and what it does to the tone? And is this a good thing, a bad thing, or simply a unique thing? What's everybody's opinion on this?

Yeah, I can go along with SS frets.

I had an Elite like the one in Peegoo's pic, wine reddish burst. I'm still mad at myself for buying that pig, but if I look at pics of my hair style during that era its clear there was a broad spectrum of poor judgement.

I guess the guitorgan also falls into the category of more like electronic innovations specifically used for guitar, but I found them interesting: www.premierguitar.com/articles/the-guitorgan-1 I used to know a guy who had one.