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I’m trying to figure out why a zero fret might be a bad idea and can’t come up with a reason
Please enlighten me.

They get a bad rap for being used on some cheap guitars decades ago.
But if I don’t have to tediously file away at a piece of bone AND get consistent tone across all strings whether fretted or not, why would that be a bad thing?

Thanks
dave

Apart from the image thing, no reason.
But, the open string with a nut could/can be a tone plus for a player, if using that as a root note possibly?

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

I like zero frets. Won't hear me badmouth them.
But I like making nuts from bone. They can be classy when done right.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

I agree. There are plenty of fine instruments out there with 0 frets.

Dave

I've done some instruments with zero frets and they work O.K., but you still need to make a string spacer, and like any fret they wear out eventually and the entire thing needs to be replaced. I know nuts wear out too, but individual slots can be filled and reslotted to keep them going. It is mostly an aesthetics thing and the perception that it is done on cheap instruments.
Using stainless for the zero fret might be a good idea.

The idea some people have that a zero fret means a guitar is cheap is bull. There are high end guitar builders who have used them for decades.

I wonder what the details are for set up. Is a zero fret treated exactly like any other fret in terms of leveling?

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

^^^ Yes. ^^^

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

When I used zero frets I seated them but didn't hit them with anything as far as leveling goes. Since the strings were in contact with the strings constantly any small additional height of the metal gave a little more wear resistance. That was also my thinking that harder stainless wire might be a good idea for the zero fret.

I didn't have time to read the other posts so forgive me please is anything here is redundant.

Dave my friend zero frets are not a bad idea but our position is that you can do better, have a tighter, easier to play set-up with a conventional nut. I am speaking of differences although minor that can be actually measured and felt by a player.

As you mentioned zero frets are associated with cheap crap guitars and there is a reason for this. Good nut making is a art and too many builders see guitars as woodworking projects and not what they really ultimately need to be - tools for musicians. As such this view that a guitar is a wood working project leaves some of the other skill sets that need to be learned over time and from experience such as fret work, nut making, saddle making, intonation, set-up, etc by the wayside.

A guitar with a zero fret can be a very high quality instrument of course and it can be set-up very well. We can do better without a zero fret though and zero frets are not immune from wearing too low and needing to be replaced.

Visualize this please: Strings have varying levels of stiffness depending on materials and the thickness. As a string breaks over the zero fret or ANY fret it tend to arc at the break point. This means depending on the stiffness of the string that even though it is in full contact with the top of the zero (or any) fret that sting will be slightly higher over the next fret. The thicker and stiffer the string the greater the space over the next, subsequent string. This is a string arcing.

Now it's luck of the draw with the zero fret since you have zero control.... over that distance that the strings arc over subsequent frets. A sting that is too high leaving the nut or zero fret will be sharp when fretted especially close to the nut and zero fret.

With a conventional, serviceable, well made nut I can control exactly what the height of each individual string is over their own individual fret planes. This also lets me nearly eliminate and certainly greatly minimize sharp notes because strings require too much downward force to fret.

Am I saying that with a conventional nut vs. a zero fret I have more control over intonation and action? Yes.

My world is a bit different since we are taking top dollar from our clients for superb work. There is an expectation that we will do superb work and milk every last ounce of playability and/or tone out of the set-up/instrument. This means that something that is a compromise such as a zero fret where some strings are too high, some aren't, etc is not desirable and limits results.

And of course everyone who comes to guitar building at some point thinks that we have a better mouse trap in mind when we very, very rarely do. All this stuff has been debated over and over and over again and at the end of the day there is a reason why guitars, the good ones are as they are.

So nothing wrong with a zero fret but there is a better path with more control over the set-up. I'll add like it or not, true or false perceptions of the market are very hard to overcome and no one here is going to be successful in evangelizing and converting the world to be fans of zero frets. Bob Taylor had to argue for years that a bolt-on neck could still sound decent, this argument continues to this day. Zero frets rightly or wrongly will always be thought of by some as what they saw on a $29 yard same special that came from China 30 years ago. They had a bad rap although undeserved.

Guitar players tend to be traditionalists too where old notions die hard.......

Lastly as builders my goal was never to equal what say Martin did. Screw that, who needs equal let's do better than Martin. Or, in other words and there was no deliberate intent on my part to single out Martin, Martin is a great company, our mission here in individual builder/Luthier land is to produce outstanding instruments where we leave f*ctory instruments in the dust while offering and displaying a level of craftsmanship perhaps not seen since that 1867 Martin we are discussing in another thread. That was and is my goal and it's attainable too.

As such there is some expectation that if one is a builder they can make a decent nut easily and reliably too. If that is not the case that's where some attention should be paid and that's why we sensed a real gap in what you guys discuss here. There is a day when the wood working is done, the neck is on, it's been successfully finished and now it needs to be fretted and nuts and saddles made and a set-up done. None of these things should ever be a challenge for anyone who wants to call themselves a Luthier. It's what we do every day in Luthier land.

So there is it my take from a busy, commercial shop that does encounter zero frets but almost always on crap instruments. Oh, why were zero frets prevalent on cheap instruments? Because the skill set required to make a well functioning, good looking, minimalistic nut from proper materials is much greater than the gorilla who pounds in a zero fret and calls it a day. F*ctories don't like having to pay for skilled or semi-skilled labor so they went cheap with the zero fret. It was economics.....

This is also our opportunity, our opportunity to shine and let our abilities and skills free range for all to see for the rest of the time that our kids, our instruments exist.

Yep all true and with proper filling of a proper nut a low slot can be built back up infinite times. Carlos Santana likes melted brass in his nut slots. We use light cured dental filling which are a bit harder than the bone nut itself.

Just wanted to mention that yes a stainless zero fret is a good idea except for the gigging musician who will claim to hear a difference in a stainless fret and if we use on the zero fret this "tinny" tone as they describe it to us is now on all open notes. So I would be reluctant to use a stainless zero fret on an instrument that the player does not have direct, personal experience with what to expect tone wise from stainless. If not you may have to replace it with nickel silver.

I bring this up because more than once we have been paid to remove all the stainless frets and go nickel silver, some people hear a tonal difference, I do too, Dave does not.

I don't use them as I compensate nuts for better intonation but I can see they are not terrible

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John Hall
blues creek guitars
Authorized CF Martin Repair
Co President of ASIA
You Don't know what you don't know until you know it

I've only seen this on banjos. It's been a long time since I thought about this, could you share your theory on this

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

Hello Hesh,
Nice to see you posting again!
I've used zero frets on the cheap and cheerful "pickin sticks" I built with Formica bodies, so I am reinforcing the stereotype that zero frets put forth.

John,
I think I remember seeing where some one did "nut compensation" on a zero fret by bending it into a contorted shape before inlaying it into the slot. It seemed like a lot more work than making a compensated nut.

I use them on the Selmer guitars I build because it's traditional. They work fine but as mentioned you can control the string height better with a nut. When I set up a nut the strings get higher from treble to bass, something you cannot do with a zero fret, well not precisely anyway. I use the typical 3rd fret trick when setting up a nut. The first two string will ever so barley miss or even kiss the first fret when holding the 3rd then they have more and more air space going down to the low E. This is to compensate for players who like to bang on open E,A, and D chords. So a nut definitely gives you more control but I would agree that the one advantage to a zero fret is that it does give you the same tone on the open strings. The way I used to set up the Selmer zero fret is to fret the guitar then dress and crown them, then I install the zero fret so that gives me a bit more height on the bass strings at the expense of the treble but it seems to work well. But then i got to thinking about it and not many Gypsy players even play open chords so I now dress the zero fret down with the rest of them.

Here is one of Nigel Forster's compensated zero frets. Nothing cheap looking about that, IMHO.

I wonder how much of a PITA that was to fabricate and install?

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

I’m wondering how he made it at all. Doesn’t look bent.

Looks like a CNC'd fret in a CNC'd slot

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Yes I see that now. Thanks

Hi, everyone. I’ve only posted a couple of times, but I find this discussion very interesting. (I’m Viktor, and I’m just finishing up my 10th instrument.)
This may be a dumb question, but… do open strings on a zero fret guitar really sound like fretted strings. I think anyone can generally hear the difference between an open chord and a bar chord on a regular guitar. Is this not true with zero frets? (My guess is that you can still hear the difference.)
I’m sure this had been said before, but one would think that the advantage of a zero fret is that you can treat it like any other fret. But this isn’t true, otherwise the compensated zero fret wouldn’t make sense—though I’m sure it does.
Among the many things I’ve learned from this forum is the importance of taking the first-fret string height down low, even lower than a straight-edge laid across the frets would suggest. By listening to Hesh, I’ve set up some guitars that play better than I would ever have imagined. (I can't thank Hesh enough--his advice has been transformative.)
This leads me to assume that it is the break angle that makes the difference, and that the way to make a zero fret behave like any other fret would be to eliminate the break angle and install some sort of capo thing on the zero fret. That sounds unnecessarily complicated, but I’m a fan of traditional, well-set up nut.

Viktor, you are right that a bar chord sounds different from an open chord, but I don’t think that is the right analogy for the sound of a zero fret. A fleshy finger doesn’t create the same constant pressure. It would be better to think of the situation of using a good quality capo. With a capo on you are making the fret function as a zero fret. What do you think of the sound and playability and action of a guitar with a capo? If that is OK for you then you won’t have any problem with a zero fret. You do need a small break angle at the zero fret but this happens naturally as long as the slot in the nut is cut deep enough that it gets below the height of the fret. Therefore the string rests on the zero fret and the nut is not really holding it up, it is just acting as a string spacer and also directing the string on its path to the tuner.