Paul Davids reviews new guitar innovation

Check this out. Paul Davids reviewing some pretty amazing guitar innovation.

Cheers, Shane

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That’s almost surreal!!!
Thanks for the share Shane but I think it’s just too futuristic for me… I really love more traditional guitar shapes & features!

Tod

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Super interesting… thanks for sharing!

Cool find, Shane!
I have a feeling that many who invest in one of these will experiment with a variety of different set-ups/pickups/cards etc. until they find their ‘sweet spot’ and then largely stick to that one. (Even more so than many of us do with fancy amp settings :rofl:)
What you’re paying for here is ‘potential’, which is impressive.
We do it all the time :grinning_face_with_big_eyes:
I have a PodGo with 3-4 saved settings I sometimes use.
I’m typing on a PC that could probably cure cancer or start WWIII if I knew how to employ its capabilities. I use it as a word processor, calculator and surfing the web.
The removable frets are novel! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes:

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Yes, I’d love to have the discretionary income to buy one to just to test it out. I thought too that the fret engineering was brilliant.

Cheers, Shane

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Wonderfull engineering. I didn’t know that something like this could be possible, but it is.
Too early to say anything about it except that i’d like to try one too,
But alas, i don’t have the budget either… :slight_smile:

Thank you for sharing this little gem!

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I would love to try one, but no way I would buy this. This is an incredible engineering and amazing to see. Paul covered this point exactly, by asking if he is impressed by technology or the guitar itself. It seems that he also see a little real added value compared to regular guitars. I think the critical point is how would this, fully modular guitar stand the test of time. Would neck conection be still firm after years of playing and attach/detach actions? Would fret “click” system perfectly hold with guitar being dropped and neck being hit? Would pickup connections be bullet proof? We already saw he had connection issues after swapping pickups in his brand new demo guitar, which was carefully picked for him for sure. Glued/bolt-on necks, pressed on and glued frets, soldered pickup connection are as reliable as it gets, you would break the neck before you would affect any of those connections.

What I really LOVED and always wondered why it is not the feature on all guitars is fully adjustable nut. Why wouldn’t guitars come with adjustable nuts, same as bridge? I never understood this, especially when you see that you have to file nuts or add glue/material to lower/raise it. So inefficient!

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For a long while the average guitar buyer was a middle-aged bloke who argued that hide glue sounded better than modern alternatives. The biggest brands sold on the long heritage and history. Gibson tried to introduce innovations (including an adjustable nut) to the LP in 2015 … look at how that worked out for them :slight_smile:

This guitar is objectively better than a traditional build in many ways, and when old farts like me stop being the driving force behind product development decisions then I’m sure we’ll see these sort of things becoming more common.

That said, this old fart likes his old traditional guitars and calls the imperfections ‘character’.

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@CATMAN62 I agree. It should be the person playing the machine, not the other way around. For centuries, this is the way it was, including now days. Might as well put a nickel in the juke box and sit back and listen. Could turn GAS into GPAS too. (Guitar Parts Acquisition Syndrome)

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Or experiment with it until they screwed it up so bad they’d have to send it back to the factory for a factory reset. Didn’t see an F8 key on it any where. :grinning_face:

If I was still playing in a band I think I buy one or at least try one. Isn’t any more money than a good Les Paul. There is a lot of potential for doing quick set ups, experimenting and setting it back if you don’t like the changes very quickly and like Brian mentioned then leave it in your sweet spot.
Plus every gigging musician has back up guitars just in case you main one goes down. This would be just one more.

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Technology can be fun if you a fully conversant but when you aren’t an expert and you have so many feature to adjust It will soon all sound so crazy, then what do you do.

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@Richard_close2u how do you unflag a post. I went to give @brianlarsen a like and click the flag by mistake.

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Hehe, let’s just call it a downpayment for the next time I’m annoying :rofl:

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I think it’s great to see people trying to engineer improvements in guitar design. It’s amazing that the basic electric guitar designs have remained largely unchanged for 70 years. I know people will say that this is because they were spot on to start with. While it’s largely true that some of the initial guitar designs have really stood the test of time, the ability to adjust string height at the bridge and nut seems quite obvious. I don’t like all the electronics additions much but seeing the way action is set at both ends on a neck with no relief and the adjustable frets is really interesting.

I was surprised when the guy who builds the guitars mentioned how incredibly low he would set the action. That’s a sure way to greatly reduce sustain - Indeed Pail Davids mentions that with a very low action the guitar sounded a bit dead. In my guitar build and guitar restoration, I played around quite a bit with both action and pickup height (single coils), on a very well fret levelled neck (levelled by me), to optimise sustain while keeping the guitar easy enough to play. I was surprised how much a small differences in height can affect sustain, and even more, how differences in pickup height affects sustain and tuning stability.

I just think that the average guitar player might not know how to adjust all the innovative things on this new guitar to get the right set up.

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I enjoy (basic) physics and am interested to understand how lowering action would reduce sustain (apart from simply by reducing the strength of plucking the string).
Also, does the pickup height really affect the tuning stability? :thinking:

I don’t think he’s making these guitars for the average guitar player, he has the touring professional in mind. I’m sure there will be average players that will think they need one and will never actually use the guitar to it’s full potential.

Most average guitar player doesn’t even know how to use the volume knobs on their guitar and amp to their full potential never mind the adjustable nut or truss rod.
You said yourself how much action can kill sustain yet 90% of the members here recommend lowering action and very light strings and swear they can’t hear any difference. They never look for the sweet spot they chase tone by buying peddles not learning what the gear they already have can really do.
Just my 2c

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Brian,

As an inquisitive scientist (not a physicist, I hasten to say), who has supervised a team of experimental biologists and computer scientists for about 30 years. I did indeed ask myself these same questions during my guitar tweaking adventures.

About string action and sustain: I did test this, although not with any device measuring the signal - only using my ears. Of course, as we well know, it’s a sample size of one tester - so no replication, and of course our ears can play tricks on us. I agree with you that perhaps this doesn’t make sense. I assume sustain is essentially due to how long the string can vibrate and that any inhibition of the vibration will reduce sustain. My explanation would be that when we hit the string with a pick or pluck it with the finger, we would mostly hope that the movement of the string is in one plane - a true up and down movement. However, that will never be the case and the strings will also move towards and away from the guitar - I imagine in a sort of slight figure-of-8 pattern. My only explanation would be that if the action is very low, then the vibrations of the strings towards the guitar could be inhibited by gently hitting the frets in a way that doesn’t replicate as fret buzz but just enough to dampen the string vibration - a bit like if you could very gently touch the string and reduce its vibration. This is the only rational explanation I have for this.

Pickup height and tuning stability: My apologies. This was my bad writing and bad explanation on my part. Single coil pickup magnets have quite a strong pull. There’s the famous “stratitis” sound if the pickups are way too high that the magnets pull the strings strongly towards the pickups (esp. neck pickup). This will affect sound drastically and it will affect sustain in a very noticeable way. But that’s an extreme case of pickups being way too high and not what I meant. If you lower the pickups you can increase sustain as the magnets don’t influence the vibrations of the strings as much. At the same time, this does sort of affect tuning stability. On my strat, when I tune the 6th, 5th and 4th strings, the note will not stay completely stable - it will vary a bit in pitch - this is normal (we mostly just don’t hear it). This is at a recommended pickup height. It’s very noticeable on the D string on my strat as the pickups have quite a stagger and the magnet below the D string is nearer to the string. When the D string is essentially in tune the D will still vary slightly in pitch and it is very sensitive to tune it to a true D. I tried lowering the pickups and this no longer happens and it is much easier to get into tune and once the string is in tune there is less variation in pitch. This makes sense as there is less pull of the magnet on the string. For me, lowering the pickups made it easier to tune the guitar - but indeed this is not what we normally call tuning stability.

I hope my non-physicist answer makes some sense. :grinning_face:

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Interesting. I have an acoustic that has a simple neck angle adjustment for action that doesn’t even require taking the neck off, so that isn’t anything special. The individual fret adjustment is really cool, and the nut. But so, so complex. I imagine that adds significantly to the cost. I would also worry about stability. Systems that vibrate a lot (which would include the guitar, since that is what it does) are also good at causing movement in systems like screws that don’t lock down.

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