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Moving the Stoptail further back


PickyPick

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Hey guys. I just got done watching a Rick Beato video Are Vintage Guitars worth the money. What caught my eye almost immediately was his 1965 Gibson SG with a stop tail modification after removing the Lyre Vibrato but the placement was further back from stock Gibson's. The gap between the Stoptail and bridge was enormous but he says that the strings feel looser and its more comfortable to play with that set up. So i was curious of the Pros and Cons of taking my stop tail and pushing it back a .5" to 1" and if anyone else has done this mod before.

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Making it a longer scale will mean the strings will have to have a little more tension on them.  So the stings should feel a little harder to bend; like a fender. 

Not sure how that would make the strings feel looser.  I think it would be the opposite.  

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Perhaps. I would think the opposite as the scale is staying the same but the strings in between the bridge and stop tail got longer. I am gonna give it a shot anyway, taking my guitar beaten experimental SG to my luthier tomorrow to see if it is different. Going to leave the original posts where they are so the pickups stay grounded and if i want to switch back and forth. This poor thing has been through hell and back. I perform all my evil concocted ideas on this SG.

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12 hours ago, PickyPick said:

Perhaps. I would think the opposite as the scale is staying the same but the strings in between the bridge and stop tail got longer. I am gonna give it a shot anyway, taking my guitar beaten experimental SG to my luthier tomorrow to see if it is different. Going to leave the original posts where they are so the pickups stay grounded and if i want to switch back and forth. This poor thing has been through hell and back. I perform all my evil concocted ideas on this SG.

Sorry,  I was thinking you moved the bridge. 

Dont know why. You have stop tail in the title of your thread. My bad. 

Let us know how it works if you do it. 

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This is similar to the top-wrapping argument. Ultimately there's two points of contact, the bridge and the nut and the string has to be a certain tension to remain in tune so I really don't think there is much of a difference.

 

I'd like to a double blind study to see if people can tell the difference between normal stoptail, top-wrapped tail and a re-located stoptail.

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43 minutes ago, deeman said:

This is similar to the top-wrapping argument. Ultimately there's two points of contact, the bridge and the nut and the string has to be a certain tension to remain in tune so I really don't think there is much of a difference.

 

This is the point at which otherwise ordinarily intelligent and rational people go over the cliff.  Somehow they can grasp that the same tension is required between the nut and the saddle, but that if you change something on either side of these two stopping points, the in between will be different, even though it takes the same tension to achieve the same note.

It's all dogma from there, even though the very same folks will flood you with the very same data that should tell them that absolutely nothing changes in between.

Weird world for sure.

rct

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The tension feels markedly different between my 1993 Guild S100  and my SG's. Weird world or not it feels very different and it plays circles around my SG's.  But maybe the difference has to do with the neck having no angle versus my SG's having the steep neck set angle? IDK im not an engineer or physics professor.

IMG-6310.jpg

Edited by SGgypsyboy
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On my Franken-Splorer that I built I wanted a left handed tremolo, I had decided on a Les Trem. But when I installed it in left handed position, I found the spring got in the way of my hand reaching the bridge position. So I installed additional studs and moved the tremolo farther away from the bridge. This worked quite well, but I noticed I was getting some additional sound from the string with the "extra long distance between the bridge and tremolo" and because of the "very slight break angle", this wasn't desirable. Since it had unused stopbar studs in-between, I just installed a Down Tension Bar to fix it. My Franken-Splorer Is quite happy now.. The Point is extra long space between the bridge and stopbar can generate unwanted sympathetic noise..

BZ0dfUy.jpg

Edited by mihcmac
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