Quote:
Originally Posted by JerryM
The most significant thing I have found nut width and spacing aside is scale length. I have some very nice guitars that I no longer play due to the increase in tension something in later years I find affects my hands a great deal. spacing and width I can adapt to on any guitar but not the added tension of full scale.
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I would have agreed with you until yesterday. I had the chance to play a Martin 000-15M, which had everything “wrong”, according to my preconceived notions. It had 1 11/16” nut, and I thought I wanted 1 3/4”. It had long scale, and I knew I wanted short scale (for the same reason you talk about). But the neck profile and the setup on this guitar were so good, I never played a more comfortable guitar. I was surprised to learn, after I got home, that this guitar that I thought had to be short scale while I was playing it, was in fact 25.5”.
I’m wondering if maybe they had it set up with custom lights or something - it played like butter. But, to that point, if you run one of the string tension calculators, you find that going down one string guage makes much more difference in tension than going from long scale to short.