Loud, Bad Guitar

Of all the things on my blog the one that seems to have brought the most people here is my discussion of scale length and pickup placement on the guitar. It seems that a lot of people have questions about scale length that are in need of some simple answers. Think I can manage that. First off, a guitar's scale length is the length of the string from where it leaves the nut towards the fingerboard to the place where the string crosses the bridge saddle. This distance is (more or less) the same as the "speaking length" of the string -- the part that vibrates when the string is plucked. The strings speaking length and gauge form the basis for all the math that goes into acoustics that I'm mostly going to ignore here because we don't need all that math to get a basic understanding. Just wrap your head around this one thing: If two guitars have different scale lengths but are using the same gauge of string, the one with the longer scale length will need more tension on...

Over the weekend I realized that I had no spare strings on hand for my Hag in case I broke one while playing. This led me to a number of searches on-line as I started my typical, neurotic grad student pondering about changing strings. It started with thinking about gauges. I have consistently been upping the gauge on my strings since getting the guitar in order to deal with the effects of down-tuning to D and looking to get a bit more sustain and a little less oscillation on the strings so that I could lower the action. My last set of strings were D'Addario Medium Top Heavy Bottoms (11-52), which felt and sounded decent, but gave me some issues with the strings binding in the nut. I could take the guitar in to have the nut slots filed, but I thought I'd give light strings another shot first, figuring that this would also be a lot more convenient for getting strings locally and not having to pay shipping and wait. Meanwhile, related thoughts. I've been using D'Addarios b...