I have a deep passion for guitars, and this site serves as a platform for me to share my thoughts, experiences, and knowledge about them. I was born in Tokyo, where I lived near Budokan, a venue that hosted major rock events.
Growing up, I was surrounded by music, and my first significant musical influence was The Beatles. This led me to singing and eventually playing the guitar, initially strumming chords and later delving into distorted sounds and pentatonic scales.
When rock music made its way to Japan, I immersed myself in it, particularly the genre now known as classic rock, featuring artists like Cream, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green, Led Zeppelin, and many others. Icons such as Jimi Hendrix and Mike Bloomfield from the US also became influential in my guitar-playing journey. However, my interest in guitars extended beyond playing them; I was intrigued by the instrument itself. As someone who enjoyed tinkering, taking things apart, and understanding their inner workings, guitars, especially electric ones, captivated me.
Despite being primarily made of wood, guitars require a high level of precision. When strings are installed and tuned, they form a virtually straight line, representing the shortest distance between the nut and the bridge or tailpiece. However, the wooden neck, which can bend, warp, or twist under string tension and other structural forces, must be perfectly aligned with the strings’ top of frets. Achieving this level of precision is not a simple task.
In the early days of guitar history, this may not have been a significant concern since strings were set at higher action. However, as guitars evolved and electric guitars became more popular, especially when paired with lighter gauge strings, the demand for precision increased significantly. Fortunately, early on, someone discovered how to address the tension issue by implementing neck reinforcements (as soon as steel strings gained popularity). Subsequent inventions followed, such as the truss rod and other methods of neck adjustment and reinforcement, which have put us in a better position today.
As I continued to play and experiment with guitars, I learned how to adjust string action through reading magazines and working on my own and friends’ instruments. At the time, I didn’t possess much knowledge, but I felt that lower string action made playing easier. So I adjusted the bridge to be as low as possible. Then I discovered that deepening the grooves on the nut could further lower the string action, although it required specialized tools. With the lowest possible action achieved, I began to notice that certain notes sounded muted or dead.
It was through this experience that I learned that the top of the frets may not always be perfectly aligned. As my playing evolved and I encountered different guitars, my experiments delved into the deeper and more complex mechanisms and phenomena that guitar necks can present. (By the way, I later discovered that a perfectly straight neck is not ideal for dealing with the typical string vibration pattern. Additionally, lower action often interferes with tone, but I will explore these topics further on the Guitar Mechanism page in the future.)
Guitars offer various other fascinating aspects, sometimes by intentional design and other times through serendipity. Music frequently uncovers hidden treasures in guitar designs (for example, the Strat’s half-tone feature). All of these elements involve both the people who play guitars and those who make them. As music and expression evolve, so do the tools. Sometimes, when the tool evolves ahead of the music, whether intentionally or not, music discovers it and pushes beyond its limits. Jimi Hendrix’s impact on rock music serves as just one example of this phenomenon.
—To be continued—