my new guitar (pic)

[danstearns]

for anyone who might be interested, this is my newest microtonal
guitar. It was made by Chris Shaffer:

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/danstearns/quartertonefinished.jpg

a few specs:

25.5" scale
16" fingerboard radius
48 jumbo frets
3-piece hard maple neck-through design
rosewood fingerboard
korina(black limba)sides
Steinberger R-Trem bridge,tuners,and headpiece
one Gibson "Burstbucker 1" humbucker pickup
one 500K volume control
hand-finished in pigmented waxes

[danstearns]

and i almost forgot to mention the Spanish antique nails !

[tomb...@jhu.edu]

Thanks for the pics. Chris is a talented guy. And I love those wax
finishes his wife does.

[Old Guitar Player]

That is really cool....way too many frets for me though....I am just a
"newbie" at this whole jazz thing and the 21 or 22 frets I have on my
guitars are more than enough to keep me occupied for years to come....

I'd love to hear what it sounds like though :)

Regards

OGP

[Starcaster]

Wow, looks just like my new Steinberger GM7-SA, minus the graphite neck
and adding 24 more frets! :) The Burstbucker is a kick ass pickup too.
I have one of those on a Tele.

[tom walls]

In article <1154917371.2...@n13g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
daniel_anth...@yahoo.com says...

Do you have other microtonal guitars? How's this one compare?
--
Tom Walls
the guy at the Temple of Zeus

[danstearns]

I have a few right now, and they're really all pretty different so
they're not so easy to compare. I a 20-tone equal temperament
Ibanez-like deal--two humbuckers--that's fretted with banjo wire by
luthier/banjoist extraordinaire Glenn Nelson..

http://www.mockingbirdmusic.com/gallery.html

Unlike the 24-tone equal temperament on the new Spanish Nail
Steinberger, a tuning that retains the familiar 12-tone equal
temperament, 20-tone equal temperament couldn't be much further from
"the familiar" having very distorted fifths and maj thirds.

I also have two fretless electrics right now. A Les Paul with an
aluminum fingerboard that was made by Rick Canton, and a Kramer that I
originally took the frets off planning to refret it to something new,
but ended up playing it as is--a fretless where the fret slots were
never even filled in!

Besides the Spanish Nail Steinberger, I also have two other instruments
that were customized by Chris Shaffer. One is a tenor ukulele that I
had fretted to a maximally even 8-out-of-13 subset of thirteen-tone
equal temperament. Thirteen-tone equal temperament is almost
exclusively mentioned in tuning theory with negative connotation; as a
sort of pinnacle of atonality and discordance. But sometimes things
need a different perspective, and trying to compare 12-tone equal
temperament and 13-tone equal temperament is really quite
counterproductive. There are many truly beautiful scales and subsets in
13-tone equal temperament, and this 8-out-of-13 contains a wonderful
7-tone scale:

0, 2, 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13

The other Shaffer job was a banjotar that retained the standard 12-tone
equal temperament but was augmented with five additional Just Intonated
notes:

33/32, 7/6, 11/8, 14/9, 7/4

This gives a 17-tone octave, and this arrangement represents three
separate one-dimensional planes of 3, 7 and 11 limit ratios. It also
rather nicely approximates a 3, 5, 7 and 11-limit grid and the banjo
resonator wonderfully melds the otherness of the new notes to the
standard 12-tone equal temperament arrangement.

As far as the new 24-tone equal temperament Spanish Nail Steinberger
goes, it's a really beautiful guitar that plays great and I'm happy
,happy happy. But if I had some things I might change some day ,it
would probably start at the empty neck pickup spot... I find myself
missing that one. The other would be the jumbo frets... never did like
big frets or wide radius necks, but I live with them when I have to,
and I think those frets are there to stay!