jfilm
Member
I'm with you again, brother.
When a fingerboard is uncomfortable for me it usually has to do with the thickness of the neck, or the profile, and on some really old guitars, the neck radius. Seldom the nut width. (I have a handmade six-string with a 2" nut that I love.)
A friend has a great sounding 12-fret Martin 12-string from the '70s -- I forget the model number. For whatever reason I find it a bear to play, and I'm still not sure why. The action is good and the neck seems OK, but it just feels "stiff" -- I don't know how else to describe it. It sounds great in my friend's hands, but I just can't coax music out of it.
Great topic - I've spent a lot of time trying to find the "perfect" neck on a guitar that also speaks to me sound-wise, and it's been a lot of trial and error. I have the opposite problem to the one started in this post, so generally look for short scale guitars with fast necks, and after trying many guitars, have also come to the conclusion that the neck profile makes the biggest difference when it comes to being comfortable with how a guitar plays. I stumbled onto my D-40, and it is a regular scale with 1 3/4" nut, but it sounds so good I think it's worth the effort to get use to it. My F20 is 1 5/8" at the nut with a rounded profile, and my F4-CE is 1 5/8" with a slim profile. The F4-CE is the easiest to play for me, by far, though I think the sweet spot would be 1 11/16" with that kind of profile, maybe a shortscale F30 from the 60s with a 1 11/16", for example, which I hear are out there, though most have 1 5/8". So the search continues. Though I also think if I practiced more and searched for guitars less, these small differences would iron out.