Tailpiece mass and length

Ken Bloom

Hi all,

I thought I would share a few observations on the guitar I just completed. It might be of some help to those of you making your own.
I built myself a seven string guitar based on the Charle blueprint but using more of a Favino style bracing pattern. The results were quite satisfying and I love playing this guitar. t projects very well and is much easier on my aging hand than my old guitar.
The one big failing that the guitar has is a rather dead sound on the note C when played on any wound string, be it third string fifth fret, fourth string tenth fret etc. I went in and reduced the mass of the bridge a lot and that helped a bit but it was stillvery noticable. Last weekend, at a gig, the tailpiece exploded. It was wooden and rather light in weight being made of maple. Since I had a gig the next day I had to come up with a quick repair. I cut off the factured part of the tailpiece, screwed it back onto the bracket, and in ten minutes I was up and playing again.
The tailpiece was now about a half an inch shorter. The next day I found that the C note, while still a problem had improved! After returning home, I made a new tailpiece maintaining the shorter dimension but this time out of ebony primarily so it has more mass. On playing the instrument again, that dead C note has more life to it.
My conclusion here is that, while it didn't eliminate the problem, shortening the tailpiece and increasing the mass has definitely improved the dead zone and the guitar has better projection than it did before. Fopr most people playing a Selmac this would be a non-issue since the tailpiece is pretty standard, but for those of you who want to do some experimenting, this might be an area to examine. You can at least experiment with tailpieces without doing anything unreversible toyour guitar. It cerrtainly helped mine!

Ken Bloom