Fanfret fingerboard?

Not a uke question but a luthier question. I was checking out the eye candy at LMI’s Luthier Showcase and saw this fanfret. Is or a gimik or does it have any advantages? (Beau, we need more ukes there!)

https://www.luthiersshowcase.com/product/grand-auditorium-cw-fanfret-quilted-mahogany-lutz-spruce-with-armrest/

Not a gimmick. It lets you control string tension and gauge differently for tenor strings vs bass strings. Using a longer scale on the bass side can be very helpful on instruments with unusual extended tuning or many strings (i.e. a 7 string guitar). Probably more common on electric guitars with extended tuning than anywhere else - look at guitars marketed towards heavy metal where lower tunings are common.

Good to know, thanks. Looks like a lot of work to get right.

Like Dwizum says, they are not a gimmick, but of limited use on a four stringed instrument like an ukulele which only has one "bass" string. As for intonation issues, again, it ain't a gonna solve the problem much. Hey, but it looks cool and no doubt some ukulele luthier has come out with a fan fret model. And charges accordingly.

By the way, who has $13,500 to buy a stinking guitar???

You can get templates out of https://www.ekips.org/tools/guitar/fretfind2d/
I haven't bothered. I had issues printing the pdfs which was a problem with the Adobe reader not fretfind2d. Print actual/100% not scale to page even if it was A4 anyway.
It is also sold as being more ergonomic.

dwizum said:

Not a gimmick. It lets you control string tension and gauge differently for tenor strings vs bass strings. Using a longer scale on the bass side can be very helpful on instruments with unusual extended tuning or many strings (i.e. a 7 string guitar). Probably more common on electric guitars with extended tuning than anywhere else - look at guitars marketed towards heavy metal where lower tunings are common.

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I'd like to see a uke with four individual bridge/saddle combinations. Each could be placed the ideal distance from the nut.

Jerryc41 said:

I'd like to see a uke with four individual bridge/saddle combinations. Each could be placed the ideal distance from the nut.

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That's somewhat common on solid body electric guitars and basses as well, but like with fanned frets, might not apply much to a typical uke. As an example. A six string bass will have a huge variation in string gauges (say, from .040" to .135") and hence the compensation needed at the bridge can be really big - sometimes an inch or more. If you try to do a fanned fret 6 string bass, the bridge would have to be gigantic to allow for both the fanned shape and the compensation, so it's common to use individual bridges instead of one gigantic bridge. To put this in perspective, a fanned fret 6 string bass might have two or three inches difference between the lowest and highest string. But on a typical nylon string uke, you often need less than 1/8" variation in scale lengths to compensate. You don't even need a slanted saddle, much less individual bridges.

I do think the individual bridge concept looks pretty cool though! It's a nice visual departure from typical solid body bridge designs. It's on my "some day" list for a solid body steel stringed uke. There aren't many bridge options for solid body electric steel stringed ukes, and the cheap cigar box guitar bridges that are sometimes used often have the wrong string spacing for a uke. Using individual bridges would get you more flexibility for string spacing, and since they're commonly sold for 6 string guitars - you could just use 4 on a uke.

Jerryc41 said:

I'd like to see a uke with four individual bridge/saddle combinations. Each could be placed the ideal distance from the nut.

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Individual saddles at ideal distances from the nut on an ukulele has been done. As a matter of fact it seems I remember that Ken did a bridge with individual saddle slots one time but I could be wrong. Ken? Others have posted here doing the same thing. It does entail a lot of extra work and proper calibration for string thickness and action height though and never seems to really catch on, but theoretically at least, it could result in solving intonation issues on reentrant stringed instruments like the ukulele.

Reentrant: On a stringed instrument, a break in an otherwise ascending (or descending) order of string pitches is known as a re-entry. A re-entrant tuning, therefore, is a tuning where the strings (or more properly the courses) are not all ordered from the lowest pitch to the highest pitch (or vice versa).

Lanikai had individual saddles on their TunaUke - usage manual . Looks kind of finicky.


I imagine it would be tricky to hook up an under-saddle piezo on one of these, though there are individual saddle piezos in the wild.

Unfortunately Lanikai did cheap plastic on the low end models for that. Bad proof of concept.