Originally Posted by: ChristopherSchlegelOriginally Posted by: dlwalke
So this was a fun little project. I calculated the points beyond the fretboard that would give me octaves (2 octaves up) if playing at the indicated frets, as an aid to getting accurate pinch harmonics. Seems to work pretty well.
Looks like a Brian May guitar! Looks like your postions work for the natural harmonics. But remember that as soon as you fret a note the entire harmonic location changes based on the adjusted length of the string.
And the entire point behind pinching in different places is that you are effectively "replacing" the bridge with your thumb graze temporarily. This means the calculated distance is between the fretted note & your thumb when you pick. At that point the open string harmonics are irrelevant.
Hope that helps!
Yep, it's a Black and Gold "Red" Special. Once I get an amp, I'll be all set. Actually, I quite like the tone of the unamped guitar, and with my wife working from home right now, it's just as well (but still, I'm itchin' to get an amp). I'm trying to pace my gear purchases, using them as sort of desert for completing more skill-based things.
The marked positions on the tape are more like extended fret markers (3, 5, 7, 9 are "fret" positions past the 24th fret, so the positions of a 27th, 29th, 31st, 33rd fret if there were actually frets there). They're not meant to be used, necessarily, to play open string harmonics or to indicate where I must pinch to get a specific tone. So, for example, if I were fretting on the 3rd fret of the A string (which would make my functional string length 20-1/4" [fret to bridge]), a pinch harmonic at the place marked "3" on the tape would give me a C two octaves higher (i.e., higher than the C that I would get if I were picking normally and not doing a pinch harmonic) because the node-to-node (bridge-to-thumb) distance at that point is 5-1/16", or 1/4 of the previous functional string length. If I then wanted to go up a whole tone (maybe I'm running up the G minor pentatonic scale, going from C to D), I would fret at the 5th fret and place the pinch harmonic at the "5" mark to get a high harmonic D. If I wanted instead to go 3 semitones up (to D#), I would place the pinch harmonic just slightly ahead of the "5" mark.