No hit wonders his about all the interesting instruments that surprinsingly dissapeared with time, despite including some extraordinary, or not, innovations.
Today my hat goes off to Micro Frets, created in the 1960s by Ralph Jones.
We will be looking at a rather simple but brilliant invention, the Micro Nut.
Mr Jones noticed that many times setting the intonation at the bridge just wasn't enough, especially with the G string (as many Gibson Les Paul owners can tell you), so he came up with and adjustable nut, mind you this was decades before any other compensated nut product.
The way it worked was incredibly simple, each string had a micro nut and was seated in a roller to help with tuning stability and to make moving the nut a smoother process, each tiny nut was allowed a few millimeters of movement (more for the G string) and by tightening the screw you would lock it in place, allowing you to bend or play as hard as you wanted without any chance of ruining the intonation, to prevent the string from popping out of the roller, all strings had a guide.
All very simple and incredibly effective.
Mr Jones inventions didn't end with the Micro Nut he came up with some amazing ideas way before their time, among them, a compensated vibrato bridge, locking saddles (so the intonation would stay put), ergonomic necks, volume and tone pots hidden between the two layers of the pickguard (if you look closely at the first picture you'll see it) and a built in wireless transmitter in 1968!
Unfortunatly the Micro Frets instruments never quite caught on, by the mid 1960s the number of guitar companies and custom builders was huge and the interested in the electric guitars was slowing down, the Micro Frets weren't cheap instruments to produce, and they didn't have a large fanbase. The Micro Frets brand ended with an estimated 3000 intruments produced.
Nowadays these instruments are gaining fans and in the 2000s the Micro Frets was planning on making a comeback and reissuing some of their old models, their website in currently down, and the project is on hold.
It would be great to see a comeback either with reissues or new designs incorporating the incredible ideas of Mr Ralph Jones.
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