Big wide neck for Mr. Fat Fingers

I have a Musikraft neck that I got several years ago for my ‘62 reissue Strat. I really ought to heve it installed. 🤣

I left it at 25.5.  It's a tad longer than I would like but with my big fingers and hands I decided that since I am going to have to get used to the wider neck and string spacing the extra length would probably be a benefit once I got used to it.  That seems to be playing out.  One of these days I should play the Les Paul again to see if it feels strange yet after playing the Strat so much.

 What's odd is that my old SG never feels strange to me.  I spent most of my formative years banging on that thing.  I gigged with it for years.  Every time I pick it up it just feels right.  I almost never put it down from the time I was 17 until well into my late 30's even though I had other guitars.

The stupid wide 2016 Les Paul HP did it for me in the LPs - it's wider neck but not wider string spacing, which solves an annoyance that's existed for me for 30 years - both in terms of neck width *AND* the "push the damn strings off the fretboard" problem.

I will happily dance on the grave of the "skinny necks make me play fast" trend.

I've seen two big problems.

The first is that people hear that skinny necks are "faster" and they accept that before taking the time to see what works for them. Since people tend to do a lot of guitar shopping online or in catalogs for a very long time, they rely on "advice" like this. Demoing guitars in a show room can be awkward, so they may not realize that a bigger departure from what they're used to might really work for them. At one of my early sales jobs, I grabbed a couple guitars set up the same and tried some finger exercises I was doing at the time on the different guitars to see if I actually played faster on one than the other. I found that I didn't. I also found that necks that felt too big ACTUALLY just had a weird carve, like a hard shoulder that should've been more carefully sanded or something.

Second, skinny necks will let you get away with bad ergonomics a bit longer, so there is a resistance to them, but if you can adapt, they are better in virtually every way, even for small hands. I got my first rude awakening in high school when I got a 5-string bass and had to break my habit of shovel gripping with my thumb over the top. If I tried playing more than 5-10 minutes that way, I had shooting pains up my arm. I eventually went on to a 6-string bass before going back down to 4, but kept that wisdom. Years later I decided to try learning classical. That cleaned up my technique a LOT. You need just as much finger strength, because you have to get the string firmly to the fret to get a clear note, while you can be a bit more sloppy with steel. The bigger neck and the changes needed to get a clean tone sort of went hand in hand - I had to hold it differently, even if I had mitts big enough for a classical to feel like a '70s Strat.

I'm glad to see more medium to large sized necks out there. For a long, long time if you wanted anything that wasn't skinny (I'm putting most '90s and '00s MIM and MIA Fenders in the skinny camp) you had to go Custom Shop or get some signature model. I'm also not hearing anyone complain that the new ES-335 is too chunky, though it is definitely bigger than the old ones. I have a 2005, and much prefer the new ones which are more of a medium profile. I'd be very tempted to upgrade if finances were different and I actually played more.

Aside from the comfort level thing the other issue I've had with skinny necks is stability. My Epi 335 Pro for example, I can practically flatten the strings on the fretboard by tugging on the headstock. Frequent trussrod adjustments. Every neck swap I've made to a chunkier neck has resulted in a more stable, better playing and more resonant instrument. While I'm moving away from the previously favored 1" baseball neck I still prefer one that is sizeable at the nut and tapers up to near 1".