Hans Bezemer's 7 string headless guitar: Tuned in fifths

[Jason Rodgers]

That turned out really well, Hans! I particularly like the bridge: I had thought of doing that on a trash-caster/steam-punk sort of instrument, but using hex head and mismatched bolts for a thrown-together effect. Did you set intonation with the location of the inserts, or is there enough room on the head of a bolt to file an edge fore and aft to dial in intonation? Nice work!

[Warren May]

Really interesting project, Hans. Looking forward to the soundclips.

[Hans Bezemer]

I've made a soundclip: http://youtu.be/QN32nlO8WbU

I've had to adjust the saddles, because the strings hardly needed any compensation. I don't know why but maybe the fanned frets have some influence.

I will evaluate the build later on, for now I'm happy with the result.

[Hans Bezemer]

The video did not work well, I've made a new link: http://youtu.be/U2WRQ8oFxQI

[Hans Bezemer]

I want to evaluate the guitar after a month of usage.

There are several features which I like and will continue to use:
- 760-660 mm string length: This gives a long enough string length on the bass side to get a good tone, but it still lets me play chords comfortably
- The headless tapered neck: This makes it easy to make the neck. The neck can be cut on a table saw using a jig to cut a taper.
- The martin style truss rod: It's easy to make and install this truss rod and it gives enough counterforce to get a small bow.
- Birch plywood: The plywood makes a very rigid neck and the surfaces are all perfectly flat to start with. I think the guitar has a good tone and sustain.
- String gauges: Roughly I used the golden ratio (0.618) as a guide for my strings gauges and this worked out fine, giving more tension for the bass strings and less for the treble strings.

The following I will alter:
- Duo single loop pickup: I like the sound of them, it's somewhere in between a piezo-pick up and a single coil pick up. I use one pick up for the bass strings and one for the treble strings and mounted them in in line with each other. This didn't worked out well because the signal of the highest bass string and lowest treble string was a bit to weak. Next time I'll make to separate holders and place the pick ups besides each other so that it can pickup all the strings
- Body shape: Although the body shape gives an ergonomic guitar and accommodates the tuners well, I've found out that I still like to to hang my guitar on a strap, even if I sit down. Therefore I'll use a more “standard”-body shape for a next design with the tuners mounted in the body.
- Single string bridge: I've had to change the bridge because of two reasons: 1. the strings hardly needed any compensation (because of the fanned frets?) and therefore the bolts where to far of to intonate the strings, 2. the screw in nuts give a lot of play (compared to a regular nut) and this makes that the bolt is pulled sideways.
I've made an alternative (prototype!) bridge with a small piece of plywood and some beech dowels. This works surprisingly well. An advantage maybe that I can put a small piezo-pick up underneath every dowel to create a polyphonic pick up.

17 - prototype dowelbridge.JPG (119.47 KiB) Viewed 29867 times

Furthermore I have a long “the-next-time-I-want-to-do-a-better-job-on-this:”-list.
and (not unimportant) now I have to learn lo play with this tuning...

Hans