Zero fret

Hello, just a question for you techies. What do you guys think of having a zero fret on a guitar. I'm having a custom made guitar built and i'm thinking of having a zero fret with a buzz feiten. Will a zero fret improve tone on an electric gee tar? ty

if you are unsure of something, then you should probably not put it on a custom guitar.

~Incidents

A zero fret is incompatible with the buzz feiten and vice versa, the buzz feiten compensates tuning by changing the scale length slightly, using a zero fret would defeat the purpose. If having a zero fret improves tone in any way is debateable, it could only affect the open strings, once you fret a string you take the nut out of the sonic picture.

I know that they are incompatible from each other. That's what I thought until I saw from a guitar site that you can install a buzz feiten on a zero fret guitar.

Ummm heres an educated guess... is a zero fret a fret where the truss is? Ie. so you can bend an open string?

Well you could build a guitar with a zero fret to use the buzz feiten system, the distance between the zero fret and the first fret would have to be recalculated, retrofitting the zero fret on a guitar off the shelf would be some major labor/expense, nothing is impossible, just not always practical, I take it that you have this zero fret fetish because you are a Brian May fan? I would have to say Brian May and his Dad were two fairly smart fellows, they put together a pretty good sounding guitar, with some good bits of machining and some good ideas, but I'd also have to say they were lucky that it didn't come out sounding like an amplified cardboard box, because the construction is very unorthodox and even kind of crude in spots, I guess if it had sounded bad we would have never known about it, the final test is the finished product, is Burns still making the replica models?..................... Axle, the zero fret is located where the nut traditionally is, the open string would be vibrating between the zero fret and the bridge.........

I've got a burns red special and the only difference the zero fret makes is that your open chords ring more clearly, at least compared to my hamer stellar. It's not much of a difference, so it's not probably worth spending a lot on.

But I would just recomend getting a burns cause you can find them for like $500 on ebay now. Get that and the vox deacy amp $100 and your set.