Loud, Bad Guitar

So a lot of people have appreciated my discussions of scale length and pickup placement. Lately, though, I've been thinking about the other dimension that affects playing -- width. There's not a lot of discussion of it where electric guitar players are concerned beyond the big hands = wide nut conversations, but there's more to it than that. I'll get into the details of it in a moment, but first a bit of context. A few months back, I bought a Cordoba Mini R guitar. It's a nylon string classical guitar with a 20" scale length, but close to a full width and string spacing classical nut (2") and bridge. (It's tuned up a fourth to keep the strings from getting floppy.) It's a very good little guitar and so much fun to play, and the extra width at the neck really helps to keep the guitar from feeling as cramped as it might if I were having to deal with the closeness of the frets from the shortened scale. (For comparison, put a capo at the fifth fret ...

Rush got a brief flurry of attention a couple weeks back when they announced that they would be going out on tour again in 2015. The news quickly went from their press release to Rolling Stone, who immediately threw together a readership poll asking for the ten best Rush albums -- no doubt to get a bunch of people to give their contact infoso that Rolling Stone could spam their Facebook pages with ads. The irony of RS showing enthusiasm for Rush is, I'm sure, not lost on Rush. I did not answer that poll, but a friend on Facebook asked the same question on his own Facebook page, sparking a small discussion in which no one mentioned any album later than Signals and most gravitated towards either Hemispheres or the first three albums. (Confession: my response was Moving Pictures , but even that fairly populist response felt risky in the context of so many responses that trended even earlier than Hemispheres . There's a weirdly reactionary, curmudgeonly impulse that has woven...