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How I came to Multi-Scale guitars

25 years ago I had my workshop in the industrial part of Sausalito, California, located on the mudflats of Richardson Bay in an area created by the U S Army Corp of Engineers for the promotion of the US WWII effort, particularly the construction of Liberty Ships. My particular building had been the Vehicle Maintenance Shed, a low wood frame structure of 4000 square feet with a concrete floor. Being on a reformed mudflat in a time of rising sea levels meant that winter storms during  extreme high tides had a tendency to flood the building with sea water. That is a lousy quality for a guitar making facility, so although I didn’t own the building, I went to the trouble of installing a wood floor in the entire structure. I spent 15 years in the shop, and paid just  37 cent a square foot monthly for the privilege, so it worked out in my favor overall.

<> At this stage of my working life I was doing a lot of other interesting projects aside from making guitars. My finish room did double duty as a shaping room for the surfboards I had started making when I was just 16 years old. I did a decent business in high end kitchens and bathrooms, having made nearly 20 of them over the years, as well as the inevitable entertainment centers that fed so many cabinet makers in that era. I hade plenty of solid wood furniture as well, nearly running myself into the ground at one point underestimating the difficulty and cost of making one of a kind sets of fully carved dining chairs.
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<>So when an inventor called saying he had head I made guitars and he wanted to run an idea by me, I was willing to indulge him.

Roland Hannes was a Frenchman working in a local restaurant, Il Fornaio as a waiter. A classic day job for the starving artist, I thought. He let me know that I wasn’t the first luthier he had spoken to, and thought he had an idea for making a better guitar. I have had others come to me with wild ideas in the past, and so I took this with a grain of salt, of course. But his idea did seem interesting to me. He thought that my putting longer bass strings and shorter treble strings on a guitar, one could get a better tonal balance, and that   due to the way the human body interacts with a guitar, this would have little or no impact on the playability of the instrument. He showed me that I would be feasible to do this as the frets would still be straight lines, just no longer parallel. I thought about this for a few minutes, decided that he was right, the idea was feasible, and then thanked him for his time and told him I had to get back to work.
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<>No, no, no, he protested, I had misunderstood him. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of hundred dollar bills, and as he counted them out onto the workbench he told me he wanted to get a patent on the idea and needed someone with lutherie skills to make him a working prototype. He went from crackpot to customer in just seconds!
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<>Over the next few months I made him two working instruments on his “slant-fret” motif. These were Telcaster like solid bodies and had a 1 ¼” discrepancy between the shortest and longest strings. They were much more transparent to play that I had expected. After a minute or so of personal adjust, I thought they could be played perfectly competently. Rolland got himself an attorney and did a patent search which found the way clear for his actual application. This is a time consuming process, no to mention expensive. He was into it about ten thousand dollars when he discovered that another person was on a parallel course and then in fact beat him to the gate. Which is to say that another person managed to get the patent within weeks of the moment that Rolland thought it was to be his.
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<>Roland claims that this person was one whom he had tried to interest in the prototype before he had come to me. I have spoken to the patent holder, and he claims to have never heard of Rolland Hannes. Thankfully, I don’t have to decide who is right or who has been wronged.
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<>There is a huge music trade show that happens every year in the Los Angeles area called NAMM, short for North American Music Merchants. I have been going to this show each year with my best customer, Eric Schoenberg. We drive down and back, and that means we spend 8 hours or so each way in conversation.. We tend to talk about guitars. On one of these trip early in our friendship we were discussing the qualities of the OM relative to the qualities of the 000. These are two Martin models which appear, to the casual observer, to be pretty much identical. The OM precedes the 000 in the Martin history, OM’s being made from 1929 to 1933 more or less, and 000’s being made subsequently. The difference is that the OM has a 25.4” string length, and the 000 has a 24.9” string length. This small change actually makes a profound difference in the quality of the sound of the guitar. Typically, the OM had a more focused bass than a 000, and the treble is more  edgy as well. The 000 on the other hand has a very sweet treble voice, in our time it is best known as the choice of Eric Clapton for his acoustic tracks on his best selling “UnWired” effort. The trade-off for this sweetness is that this model rarely has the kind of power and clarity in the bass that OM’s take for granted.
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<>When  one of us said, “why not put both string lengths on the same guitar?”. Now I like to think it was me, but Eric likes to think it was his mouth, whichever, it was “duh” obvious that it was a good idea. I offer as evidence that it was my revelation that there are now 35 such Sexauer’s, and not a single one is a Schoenberg!
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<>It is a simple idea, in retrospect, an OM bass and a 000 treble on one guitar. Just a half inch difference in string length. I make 2 versions of the idea. One is just the string path, with the rest of the guitar being entirely conservative in appearance, though there is some necessary brace moving on the inside. I refer to this as a JB, and put it on the end of the guitar designation. An OM then is called an FT-15-JB, for Flat Top, 15” wide, multi-scale.
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<>J and B are the initials of Jack Brennerman. Jack was a year older than I in High School, and belonged to the Spartan r Society, a student police agency in my high school , SSS for short. I am not kidding. One day at lunch , while eating by myself, Jack came around and asked me where the chairs that were supposed to be at my table were. Of the perhaps 8 that should have been there, I could only see 3, so as I saw his question as completely absurd, and being the wise guy then that I still am today, I looked all around the room, particularly I the rafters, and then deadpanned that I didn’t know where they were. Jack apparently didn’t have much of a sense of humor as he responded with what I have since learned is called a right upper-cut, and knock me out cold on the floor. He broke my nose in three places, and nearly got me expelled from school for fighting with administration approved student forces. In an effort to find forgiveness, I have named my asymmetric guitar after him in honor of the fact that I can still see the evidence of our interaction in the mirror today.
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<>The other variant I call JB is the fully asymmetrical guitar, where I basically wrap the entire guitar around the string path, rather than just the braces. I replace the FT with the JB in this case, so that an OM sized guitar of this design is called a JB-15. I have made this in 13“, 14”, 15” and 16” sizes, and it has accounted for about a third of my work in the past 8 years. I have come to believe that the JB is a better guitar.
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<>Thank you, Roland, Eric, and Jack; great idea!
Bruce Sexauer, 2010

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