Scale Length and Why It Matters
What is your guitar’s scale and why does it matter? I will attempt to answer these questions and more.
I recently was chatting with a friend that has been playing the guitar for a few decades. I mentioned that Fender guitars generally have a longer scale than Gibson guitars and was explaining how this contributed to the way the guitar played and sounded. My friend was quite surprised that some guitars EVEN had different scale lengths. He could not fathom how it would affect anything, especially sound.
I have read on guitar forums and watched some YouTube videos claiming scale length, an electric guitar’s design and materials used to build the instrument do not matter… Only the pickups mattered! Even some very intelligent and knowledgable players actually believe this. Some acknowledge that it matters with acoustic guitars, but claim the pickups on an electric guitar is all you needed to be concerned about. The Internet has a way of perpetuating information that is sometimes not all together correct. I am here to tell you, when it comes to the way a guitar plays and especially the way it sounds…. EVERYTHING MATTERS!
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