Not a single photo of the palmfrets in the article, wow. Closest you get is a hand covering the entire device.

https://palmfrets.com/

I was much more interested once I saw the actual website.

Long story short, it's basically a fret at the bridge end of the guitar, so using it will bring the 'root' note of the bass strings up a semitone or few.

I can see this being pretty useful for drones when fingerpicking. Though combining this with normal frets on the top string will necessarily be inaccurate because it shortens the string length, so the normal frets will be slightly misplaced.

The last part of the first video makes it more clear: you're basically your own bass backing player with one or two notes. I see why he trademarked "palmbass" as another term.

Here's a demo that actually shows what this is about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS7hF4S9rlw

A little offtopic, but if you tune the D string down one semitone, the chords start to sound evil. Sometimes it's helpful when trying to find new interesting chords to a song.

Does anyone else hear the French name for french fries?

For people with small hands who can't reach.

If you want more Minnesota guitar innovation, look up Leo Kottke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJNq5YqZ3EI

reminds me of something, i love this sort of thing, for the same reason i like chet atkins merl travis thumb technique. it allows you to play multiple parts of the harmony, suddenly music sounds much more rich. and it will fall in exactly the same trap. these advanced mechanics will heavily inform the style you can play, and not find it transferable easy to other genres, or ensemble playing.

in that way, i find piano still the main multi-string instrument where its technique is genre-agnostic.

random stuff on a friday fwiw.

This is quite cool. Going try to make a partscaster with a bad imitation of this :-)

Please add a B bender to it and it will be the best thing ever.

Not sure what benefit this gives you at all, since (for me at least) id rather be able to 'unlock' extra tones deeper than the open string. Being able to do 3 frets on the reverse side of the guitar doesn't bring that much.

Especially doesnt bring much that couldn't be achieved with an alternate tuning.

Nothing against it, it just seems a pretty contrived invention.

It could open up new possibilities for the right musicians, I think, the way Stevie Wonder can do so much more with his chromatic harmonica. I'm a little worried about changing the ergonomics of an instrument that's already trying to destroy your hands if you play it just a little bit wrong for enough hours, but time will tell.

The Steinberger TransTrem [1] similarly allows changing pitch at the bridge. Buck Dharma and EVH used it to great effect. It's about as simple as a design as it can be but calibrating it is a process and guitarists aren't exactly a group known for their engineering prowess or progressive thinking (compared to bassists or keys players, for instance) so it never achieved critical mass. This seems like an even simpler system so perhaps it'll gain greater traction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransTrem

He had to remove the bridge pickup... no good for me.

for people with small hands who can't reach..

I wonder if you could make a quarter-tone palmfret to let you play microtones on a standard fretboard, or does the intonation not work out like that?

Undjentlemanly

I’m just a beginner player, but what are the pros / cons of this vs those quick-change capo things?

Oooh. I play acoustic. Apparently it's not quite as good because you don't want to mess with the acoustics of the instrument, but being able to get just one more bass note on each string would open up a ton of new possibilities...

Yeah this isn't the game changer he thinks its going to be. Real e-bow energy here.

Really having a hard time seeing any major manufacturer licensing the design and using it on any of their instruments.

Like, neat, but I wonder what it really gets you.

A guitar has a lot of duplicated notes. The lowest 5 notes of the low E string are unique and the highest 5 of the high E for a guitar in standard tuning.

Standard tuning is EADGBe. Every fret is a half tone. So on the low E string it goes, from open E->F->F#/Gb->G->G#/Ab->A. That A is the same A as the second open string. This is how guitars are tuned to themselves, you can play the fifth fret on most strings to find out what the next string should sound like. The exception is the B which is tuned to the fourth.

It's a bit by design, you have access to a full scale within reach of your hand, no matter where your hand is.

And this really only extends the higher range. So on the high e, instead of 5 unique notes, you'll have 5 + whatever the palmfrets give you.

Now. If it jumped you an entire octave, that could possibly be cool. Basically replace an entire pedal with a bit of hardware on your bridge.

come on, no Polyphia fans here? this is the only way to add more notes and finally shred the matrix.

as a long time guitar player, this thing has no future whatsoever, too many compromises that buy you very little musically

Bass and melody at the same time? Wow!

If you throw in playing accompaniment simultaneously you would able to emulate what a second year classical guitar player can do in his sleep!