Earvana compensated nut: any good?

[DustyCat]

From a playing perspective this means that when you are up higher and then want to come down to open "A" on the second fret, you don't have to be as gentle knowing that when you strike, your notes will be compensated for and won't go as sharp if you slam into that bitch full speed like you're driving an M3 Lee into a Leichtraktor and let the Major 3rd (C#) on the 'B' string ring out for all she's worth.  :laughing7:

World of Tanks addict?

In other news, there's a new thing out called the Sound Offset Spacer: http://global.rakuten.com/en/store/gakkiten/item/10087664/

Very cheap, I'm going to give it a try myself to see how well it works. Attractively foolproof installation process compared to Earvana, Buzz Feiten etc as well!

"World of Tanks addict?"
Ha ha! OMG yes! But now my computer got a virus and I almost flipped out on my parents from withdrawal. That's why I'm here lol  :laughing8:

Sound Offset Spacer looks similar and probably gets similar results as the earvana. Now we are really scraping the bottom of the barrel for those last morsels of perfectly intonated notes  :laughing7: but who knows?...

BTW +1 on this post!...could read all day on this stuff...
BUT...to keep it informative, I contacted the dude behind the "Fanned" fretboard a number of years ago (www.novaxguitars.com). No, not Fran Drescher, but just as hot. You know, the fretboard with the angled frets (perhaps more common on bass) and he talked at length on this one particular model, a white guitar I believe, he had for like $1500 that supposedly had piano-like intonation. He even said "jaw-dropping" intonation. Piano-like "jaw-dropping" intonation on this guitar...a guitar with "jaw-dropping" intonation....like a piano ??? I forget what he said, but he said it. There was also a thread on the Seymour Duncan forum I believe that had a video about Steve Vai with a guitar that had squiggly frets. That's right, squiggly freakin' frets to compensate for perfect intonation.

Maybe that's not really all that helpful, maybe I should get my computer fixed so I can cruise in my lend-lease Churchill  :glasses9:

 

[swarfrat]

Except that Earvana, and other compensated nuts, are NOT A FREAKING TEMPERAMENT SYSTEM. It's a compensation for the tension change needed to mash the string down to the first couple frets.  The rest of your frets are spaced exactly the same as it was before you changed the nut.

 

[stubhead]

My oblique point was that any manufacturer of any item at all that promises to "fix" guitar tuning and make your playing rapturously "in-tune" forever more is ignoring the point that Western music is designed around a tempering that has irregularities of over 15 cents at some intervals. This stuff causes consuming wars over at singer's forums and classical string player forums.

When I was starting pedal steel guitar, I realized that I had to get serious about playing really in-tune, even though I'd been playing slide for 20 years. So I spent a few minutes every day for a few years practicing against drone tones. Not just unisons and tonics, but treating the drone as the 3rd, 4th, 6th of the given scale... the result was I couldn't even stand to listen to a lot of music a lot of music I used to like, and I had to un-train my ear to allow some rock 'n' roll slop to get through. And jazz slop, and I still can't listen to those legendary sloppy old blues guys, they can't sing or play for shit. And - this happens to everyone who trains their ear that way, it's something you have to learn around to play well.

Most people with perfect pitch consider it a burden, not a help. And although television and movies are always making greater inroads into steamrolling every world culture into America, there are a lot of Asians who just can't listen to Western music, it's just too painful - and of course we feel the same way about their gamelan orchestras & kotos. You might think that the Suzuki Method would have provided hordes of Japanese ready to take over the Western classical world, but the few Asian musicians in there are Western raised.

If you play around the first five frets a lot, it's a worthy experiment. If you play a lot of chords and figures that use open strings combined with fingerings up the neck, it might cause problems. The main reason I avoid them is because on the rare occasions when I need to play chords in-tune, I put on a wound 3rd string. The real cowboy solution is to use a capo and only play G, C and D chords. The G string is the monster.

 

[DustyCat]

@ Stubhead

Thanks for the tips. Generous of you to share some insights on ear training. It adds weight to the importance of vibrato (all this talk about imperfect hearing, and western temperament). It seems to me that vibrato not only sweetens, but also perhaps tricks the ear into accepting an otherwise "out of tune not."

...could go on longer, but for now, the compensating nut really helps my open strings when rock/blues or even classical vibrato is unable to be applied (to sweeten the notes)