10 comments

  • adzm 26 minutes ago
    Not a single photo of the palmfrets in the article, wow. Closest you get is a hand covering the entire device.

    https://palmfrets.com/

    I was much more interested once I saw the actual website.

    Long story short, it's basically a fret at the bridge end of the guitar, so using it will bring the 'root' note of the bass strings up a semitone or few.

    I can see this being pretty useful for drones when fingerpicking. Though combining this with normal frets on the top string will necessarily be inaccurate because it shortens the string length, so the normal frets will be slightly misplaced.

  • xcf_seetan 12 minutes ago
    He had to remove the bridge pickup... no good for me.
    • bryanlarsen 3 minutes ago
      There is a less capable model (unifret) that doesn't require moving the pickups or adding much dampening to the soundboard.
  • Someone 33 minutes ago
  • luckydata 2 minutes ago
    as a long time guitar player, this thing has no future whatsoever, too many compromises that buy you very little musically
  • bookofjoe 1 hour ago
  • alexjplant 17 minutes ago
    The Steinberger TransTrem [1] similarly allows changing pitch at the bridge. Buck Dharma and EVH used it to great effect. It's about as simple as a design as it can be but calibrating it is a process and guitarists aren't exactly a group known for their engineering prowess or progressive thinking (compared to bassists or keys players, for instance) so it never achieved critical mass. This seems like an even simpler system so perhaps it'll gain greater traction.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransTrem

  • sollewitt 9 minutes ago
    Undjentlemanly
  • globular-toast 9 minutes ago
    Oooh. I play acoustic. Apparently it's not quite as good because you don't want to mess with the acoustics of the instrument, but being able to get just one more bass note on each string would open up a ton of new possibilities...
  • rc5150 6 minutes ago
    Yeah this isn't the game changer he thinks its going to be. Real e-bow energy here.

    Really having a hard time seeing any major manufacturer licensing the design and using it on any of their instruments.

  • bena 15 minutes ago
    Like, neat, but I wonder what it really gets you.

    A guitar has a lot of duplicated notes. The lowest 5 notes of the low E string are unique and the highest 5 of the high E for a guitar in standard tuning.

    Standard tuning is EADGBe. Every fret is a half tone. So on the low E string it goes, from open E->F->F#/Gb->G->G#/Ab->A. That A is the same A as the second open string. This is how guitars are tuned to themselves, you can play the fifth fret on most strings to find out what the next string should sound like. The exception is the B which is tuned to the fourth.

    It's a bit by design, you have access to a full scale within reach of your hand, no matter where your hand is.

    And this really only extends the higher range. So on the high e, instead of 5 unique notes, you'll have 5 + whatever the palmfrets give you.

    Now. If it jumped you an entire octave, that could possibly be cool. Basically replace an entire pedal with a bit of hardware on your bridge.