48 Frets Later

Lets talk guitar design and stuffy designers.

Guitars may come in a myriad of different shapes, flavours, styles, aesthetics, colours and finishes. These differences often are more about character and personality than actual structural design elements.

According to science a Blue guitar will ‘apparently’ play similar to a Red one believe it or not… but then there are other carefully designed elements that totally impact on the guitar at a fundamental level. The type of wood is carefully chosen for the tone and sustain it helps create, and for its ability to retain its shape, instead of bowing like some woods err would. That cut-away in the body is there to access the highest frets comfortably, the way the frets follow a ratio and get smaller as they go along the neck makes the frets actually in tune, the bridge is designed in such a way that you can dial in the correct string height and also create the correct intonation so the guitar plays in tune all over the fret board.

You can change the colour, put stripes on it and it will still be a fine-tuned machine — but start playing around with core design principals and you have a tuneless expensive monster, this is often how us stuffy, ‘fretful’ scarf wearin’ graphic designers look at our work. When you see us looking uncomfortable at particular changes to that beautiful website design it could just be that we are imagining that precious baby blue Fender Jaguar with the headstock shifted to the other end and twice as many frets.