I'm about to venture into a possibly dangerous feat of Scalloping my Acoustic Guitar (yeah, its cheap, but I value it very much). I'm planning to unstring it (duh, of course!) and then use sand-paper to scratch scratch scratch the wood inbetween the fret wires until it becomes shallow enough. I'm going to scallop the area just behind the fret wire because thats where my fingers go all the time. I have a random "tronad" acoustic guitar that I bought from Shiva Musicals. Is it advisable to do this? (The main question is, would it "withstand" and not break?)
Tronads are good guitars.. YOu should buy them from veena instead of Shiva musicals. Anyways Scalloping will probably afffect the sound.. Tronads cannot take the ujjing.. ANd its not an electric guitar so maybe you wont get a sound if you scallop.. YOu need a hollow fretboard for the sound to come.. My suggestion DONT.. And give me a call sometime.. I live in Bangalore too..
oh... I wanted to scallop only because I wanted to do 'bending' better by pushing the string "into" the fingerboard. i worked for about 3 hours and then figured the wood is too hard... ;/ here is what I've done... https://puggy.symonds.net/~suraj/pictures/myscallop.jpg (the highlighted frets are the ones that have been scalloped. the rest are untouched. and note that this is the 13th and the 14th fret... which is difficult to use anyway, so there isn't much risk here )
That bending wont produce a sound .. Rightly.. Anyways you can bend better by using Lighter guaged strings...
Hey Dude, I looked at your scallopping. You have done it in an amazing way. When I opened the pci, I was thinking that you screwed up your guitar unneccasirily but you have done an awesome job. Why dont you go ahead and finish it.
@ Ronnnie.. I have had an experience with Tronad Guitars.. Its a hollow fretboard.. The scalloping will increase the tension and also reduce the strength. .So you may not want that to happen..
dude...whatever you do...dont turn it to something like this :shock: https://www.guitar.com/Discuss/readmsg.asp?showdates=&messageID=4448303&boardID=100 good luck by the way...
Actually.. I'm now ultra confused (and scared) about even getting a custom scalloped guitar done. Why? Because there is too much of "raw" steels out there in the "air" and if I slide a lot, wouldn't it hurt my fingers? (Yes, I have very good calluses now, but still...?)
Increase the tension? You mean while we press it tends to get "tighter"? (since there is no wood immediately below the fingers?)
I am not sure what does increase in tension mean. But scalloping can help you in getting the guitar sound effortlessly with your fingers. You dont need to press it as hard as normally you'd. I have played Veena and as you know Veena's neck is completely scallopped. So I felt it was much easier to do this sliding and bending in scallopped neck than the normal ones. Especially string bending would be a feast to do in scallopped ones.
Wow! I gotta try that too.. and try to play like John McLaughlin.. u gotta listen to some old Shakti records where McLaughlin plays on a scalloped guitar. Sounds amazing! Good for playing Indian (classical) music.
I placed my order (finally) for a Custom guitar from Madras Musicals. I somehow got convinced that a scalloped guitar is too much of a pain because it seems the strings go out of tune every now and then and they become "weak" near the frets. So frequent replacement of the strings become essential. I'm not going for a scalloped neck for now atleast ;/
Its as asimple as this.. Take a piece of paper.. Break a rubber band and tie it to the ends of the paper piece so that the rubberband is straight and stretched.. and it wont stay.. But if you reinforce it with something stronger it will.. Or maybe even more paper.. Similar with the fretboard..If there is less wood that its actually supposed to have.. :think:
