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  #1  
Old 06-22-2020, 03:24 AM
jhony jhony is offline
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Default Acoustic / Classical

Hello everyone!
What is the difference that classical guitar has fret number 12 meeting the body and the acoustic is fret number 14? Both beeing the same scale size.
Thank you everyone!
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Old 06-22-2020, 04:00 AM
Silly Moustache Silly Moustache is offline
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Hi Jhony, and welcome.

What we call the classical guitar was strung with gut or nylon strings and was rather fragile.
In he USA during the 10th century, music was changing and people were travelling west and guitars and fiddles 9and banjos) were relatively light - but fragile.

Steel strings were developed which were stringer and lasted longer.
Most early "C.F.Martin" and other US based makers made for gut strings initially but as late as , I think 1927, Martin started stressing guitars for steel strings (Gibson had pretty much always made steel string guitars and mandolins).

Gibson made 13/14 fret archtop guitars from about 1908.

Martin made steel string guitars with 12 frets (to body) (up until 1929 (not a great success) then the dreadnought in 1934 (which was).
music styles evolved quickly and so did guitars.

it is my personal opinion that the pre 1934 design were superior and fortunately there are still makers which make to those earlier designs, such as Collings :







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Silly Moustache,
Just an old Limey acoustic guitarist, Dobrolist, mandolier and singer.
I'm here to try to help and advise and I offer one to one lessons/meetings/mentoring via Zoom!
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Old 06-22-2020, 08:05 AM
smwink smwink is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jhony View Post
Hello everyone!
What is the difference that classical guitar has fret number 12 meeting the body and the acoustic is fret number 14? Both beeing the same scale size.
Thank you everyone!
Not quite sure I know what you're asking, but I'll give it a shot.

Assuming you have two guitars with the same dimensions (body, scale length, etc.), then the difference between a 12-fret and 14-fret neck will most obviously manifest in the location of the bridge. If you join the neck at the 14th fret, then the bridge will need to shift toward the soundhole relative to where it would be with a 12-fret neck. If you look at traditional classical guitars, the bridge is roughly in the middle of the lower bout between the soundhole and bottom edge. With 14-fret guitars, the bridge is generally closer to the soundhole with more free soundboard between the bridge and bottom edge.

There are usually a lot of structural differences inside as well in terms of the bracing, especially if you're comparing nylon to steel string guitars. But if you stick to just one (say steel string), you'll still see a noticeable difference in bridge position between 12 and 14-fret variants of the same body style.
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  #4  
Old 06-22-2020, 08:03 PM
jhony jhony is offline
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Default Acoustic /classical

I want to say thank you to both of you guys for the info you share w me!
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