Convertible guitar ... no, no, not like that

[reluctant-builder]

As a lefty, I always run afoul of a dearth of available instruments to play. This has led me to be adequately proficient at playing a righty upside down and backwards, but I always think: how hard would it be to make a convertible guitar?

The problems, let's just consider hardtails for the moment, are angled bridges and the slots in the string nut.

The adjustable saddles in TOMs allow one almost to convert a righty to a lefty without too much difficulty, but it's never quite enough. So, why not machine an angled bridge whose posts had ovular "washers" ... which would allow one side or another to slide forward or backwards, permitting the user to adjust the slant. Like on a stop tailpiece, there could be little alan key-adjustable bolts to fix it in place once the desired slant was achieved.

This would actually be useful for purposes other than making a bridge lefty or righty. For those of us who like really heavy gauge strings, fixed slanted bridges sometimes still aren't cocked at an angle steep enough to allow proper intonation.

Moving on to the string nut, though ... this is where it gets a little dicier. Most nuts are not symmetrical as a whole, to say nothing of the string slots. A lot that I've seen are flat on the fretboard side and rounded on the headstock side. My Strat has a nut that is pretty symmetrically rectangular, though. In which case, it doesn't seem inconceivable that it could simply be worked out and flipped around, if needed.

Edit: That said, if nuts were made, say, with two little posts in the bottom that fit into small divots made in the neck's trench, they wouldn't necessarily need to be glued in; the string tension would keep it in place and the posts in the divots would aid in it remaining in place if the tension were relieved to adjust the truss rod or change strings, etc... This would make it much easier to just change the nut for one dexterity or the other. /Edit.

There are myriad permutations, I know. Floyds, LSRs ... about the former, I know nothing, as to the latter, I know the ball-bearing position and character of the string slots preclude flipping it. But this isn't a proposal I expect to work in all cases, just some. And it really isn't that inconceivable, to me.

I suppose the bottom line is that it's just not worth the cookie-cutter companies' time and money to develop.

 

[dNA]

I suppose the bottom line is that it's just not worth the cookie-cutter companies' time and money to develop.

ultimately I just don't think there's enough demand. You'd be raising the stock price of guitars built for the vast majority of the market, just to make a model that's accessible to a niche market.

 

[reluctant-builder]

That's definitely a fair remark and what I alluded to in my kicker, but when I consider the sheer glut of guitars out there ... holy cripes there are so #$%@iin' many of them ... how many of those ever make it into anyone's hands? Ever get taken home? I have to imagine there is a #$%&-ton of stock that is never sold.

So, taking into account that the guitar market is flooded with waste, if they curbed that production just a tad, and made just one model with a pivoting bridge, I think it would sell. Forget the nut. Just the bridge. It would allow for guitars to accept a wider range of string gauges and it would have the residual effect of making an axe easier to convert to lefty.

 

[reinhold]

For the nut, a zero fret and then just some sort of nut as a loose guide for the strings behind it might work for that type of idea.

 

[Cagey]

That's definitely a fair remark and what I alluded to in my kicker, but when I consider the sheer glut of guitars out there ... holy cripes there are so #$%@iin' many of them ... how many of those ever make it into anyone's hands? Ever get taken home? I have to imagine there is a #$%&-ton of stock that is never sold.

So, taking into account that the guitar market is flooded with waste, if they curbed that production just a tad, and made just one model with a pivoting bridge, I think it would sell. Forget the nut. Just the bridge. It would allow for guitars to accept a wider range of string gauges and it would have the residual effect of making an axe easier to convert to lefty.

You can't set up a straw man, then use it as an argument to force everyone to do something silly. The guitar industry isn't congress or a church <grin> So, nobody's going to "take into account that the guitar market is flooded with waste". It's just not. There aren't tons of guitars that are being fed into landfills because of an oversupply. I mean, think about it. If that were true, don't you suppose some manufacturers would go out of business, and others would simply reduce their production? Why would anybody build dramatically more guitars than they could possibly sell, then just throw them away? This isn't some wild-eyed over-controlled socialist state like Russia, where central planning says "make 12 million tires" even though there's only a market for 20,000 of them. At least, not quite yet. We'll see what happens in November of next year.

 

[reluctant-builder]

OK. Fair point. It was pure conjecture on my part and surely a fair amount of hyperbole ... but, damn, there are a lot of frickin' guitars hanging on the walls of all the shops I've seen and it certainly seems like a lot of the stock doesn't change. Unless, of course, it just turns over like mad and they replace all the old guitars with exact facsimiles and hang them up in the same places.

 

[dNA]

Unless, of course, it just turns over like mad and they replace all the old guitars with exact facsimiles and hang them up in the same places.

You'd be surprised dude. I think THAT is a lot more depressing than the idea of nobody buying anything

 

[bagman67]

Unless, of course, it just turns over like mad and they replace all the old guitars with exact facsimiles and hang them up in the same places.

You'd be surprised dude. I think THAT is a lot more depressing than the idea of nobody buying anything

I think the more interesting specimens (or more sensibly priced, or more aggressively pushed) move quick.  The stuff that hangs on the wall does so because either the sales guys aren't doing their jobs, or they have more profitable stuff to move. 

 

[Cagey]

I suspect there are a lot of "cookie cutter" guitars hanging around, too. Mass production being what it is, somebody like Guitar Center or Best Buy could have dozens or even hundreds of tobacco burst Strat-style guitars waiting in the warehouse that all look identical. You could sell 10 a day, and if somebody came in a week later, it would look like the same unit was hanging on the wall. And in fact, it may be. If nobody wanted the display model for some reason, they may have moved dozens of units out of the warehouse that you'd never have seen.