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Old 09-24-2020, 04:01 PM
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justonwo justonwo is offline
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Well, sort of. The scale length and the fret where the neck hits the body are really independent variables. You can have a 12 fret or 14 fret long scale or short scale.

That Norman Blake guitar you're talking about looks like a short scale OM (called a 000 in Modern Martin parlance). The neck joins the body at the 14th fret, but the scale is 24.75". That's not really a Frankenstein configuration. It's just one of Martin's historical iterations.

Before the OM existed, you had the long scale 000 12 fret. By shortening the upper bout of the 000-12 and moving the bridge closer to the neck, Martin came up with the OM. Still a long scale guitar, but now 14 fret. I'm no Martin historian, but at some point, those long scale OMs were replaced by shorter scale guitars that went back to the "000" designation. They had the same body shape as the OM but with a shorter scale (24.9, I believe). So "000" went from referring to a long scale, 12 fret guitar, to a short scale 14 fret guitar.

So you have to be careful with Martin designations. 000 can mean a long scale 12 fret or short scale OM.

But that's just Martin's naming conventions. In reality, you can have long or short scale in either configuration. But once you pick a scale length, the location of the frets and spacing is not adjustable.
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