[reprinted by permission from MegArticles Two-Handed Tapping Archives]
Image by Brian Hathcock via Flickr
HOW DO YOU COUNT FRETS?
It’s not a silly question.
I have been surprised by how many times this question comes up.
Since this little question baffles so many people, I did a search on our favoriite search engine, and didn’t find the answer there. Google [...]
A: People sometimes ask if they can buy one of our String Deadeners, sometimes called a String Mute.
You don’t need to buy one from us, because you can make your own string deadener easy as pie.
Just go down to Ace Hardware, in the kitchen department, and look for ’shelf liner’. It’s a spongy material, usually [...]
A: It’s a matter of priorities. In our design process, we’re mainly interested in the sound and playability. So you think, what do we know sounds best? How can we utilize the science of sound? And what will give us superior playability?
For example, guitar-builders know if you want good tone, the instrument must be somewhat [...]
A: They’re pretty darn good, but we don’t think they’re perfect. Perfection is a moving target. As soon as you’ve improved one thing, it’s impossible not to see something else that could be done better.
In the southwestern United States, there was once a tribe who believed that if they made a pot or a blanket [...]
A: Well, first of all, if you know how to play any other manufacturer’s instrument specially made for touch-style play, then you’ll find our instrument very easy, and you may well enjoy some of the innovations we’ve added.
That said, we think there’s a lot to like about instruments made by several other manufacturers, and generally [...]
A; Real fast, compared to other makers of tapping instruments, because we use what we call the ‘Almost Ready’ Inventory System.
Though ideally we would like to offer ’same day shipping’ like Amazon Books, in practice it’s not always that way. Because our instruments are ’semi-custom’, although we generally have plenty of stock, we cannot apply [...]
A: The term 5×7 means an instrument which has five bass strings and seven melody strings. Because we’ve chosen to maintain modular design principles using only standard parts, we’ll stick with six strings in a string group, because there are so many pickups and bridges available for six strings.
I don’t know what ‘left-handed’ actually means [...]
A: Lots of folks believe this, because Buzz Feiten’s *first* discovery had to do with moving the nut to make the open strings play more in tune with the fretted strings.
However, after that he went further, and along with super-luthier Greg Back of Southern California, they developed a whole set of adjustments you make to [...]
A: Check it out with your own ears. It works. Major players all over the globe, including Stu Hamm, Liona Boyd, Robert Fripp, Larry Carlton, Jimmy Haslip, Joe Satriani, and Steve Vai all have good ears. Every one of them will now play on nothing else. You’ve got ears. Give a listen to a Feiten-tuned [...]
