Don't Fret It

by James Upchurch

Submitted : Fall 2014

For this project I found a reliable mathematical model to calculate the approximate length between any two frets on a given guitar. To do this, I used a guitar of my own and measured the distance from the bridge (the bottom of a guitar) to the nth fret, starting at the nut (the top of the guitar) and working my way down the neck. As the fret number increased, the length from that fret to the bridge decreased, showing an obvious relationship between the fret number and its distance in centimeters from the bridge.

With this data, I found the average of ratios between each fret and inserted this average into a geometric sequence. With this sequence, one can approximate the length between two specific frets or the distance from any fret n, be it 1 or 100.

[ Back ]