Guitarist and inventor Anders Thidell spent 15 years developing
Anders’ original goal was to make a guitar that would play in true Just Intonation. Unhappy with the dissonances and beating inherent in the standard 12-tone Equal Tempered tuning, Anders began investigating alternative temperaments. He soon started experimenting with adding extra frets, and shifting the positions of others, in an effort to improve the sound and tuning of his guitar.
Many years, and tens of thousands of hours of hard work later, Anders achieved his goal - with a guitar with 56 individually curved and dynamically intonated frets. This long-scale (30”) guitar plays beautifully in Just Intonation, and has received many accolades at music shows in Sweden and Germany. But the instrument was too costly, not to mention difficult to master, to generate enough interest to justify putting it into full production. Anders’ inventions lay fallow for a while, but then he got an order to build a one-off custom guitar for one of the brave souls willing to face the prospect of learning to use all those 56 frets. No longer having the facilities to build it, he teamed up with long-time friend, guitar technician Paul Guy.
The True Temperament™ story
Curved Frets™ and Dynamic Intonation™.
Paul has been playing guitar since 1959, and has worked as a guitar builder and repairer in his own workshop in Stockholm since 1980. He is an internationally acknowledged authority in the field of guitar tuning, and a scholar of tuning history and the “forgotten temperaments”, as he likes to call them. Paul and Anders share a common, burning interest in tuning and temperament as it applies to the guitar, and they had had many long discussions about their individual ideas over the years, little realising that their paths were inexorably converging.
Paul (“Finally!”, he says) saw the inherent potential of Anders’ inventions as applied to a guitar with a "normal" number of frets - not only to optimise the tuning of the 12-tone equal tempered scale to an unprecedented degree, but also to free the guitar from the straitjacket of Equal Temperament entirely, without making it more difficult to play.
Anders had already begun to think that maybe a guitar with a few less frets on a “normal” scale length would be easier to handle than 56 frets on a long scale neck in Just Intonation, so it didn’t take them long to convince each other that the best way to launch their idea was to make replacement necks for the most popular bolt-neck guitar models.