Guitar It is flat on classical guitars and slightly curved crosswise on acoustic and electric guitars. The curvature of the fretboard is measured by the fretboard radius, which is the radius of a hypothetical circle of which the fretboard's surface constitutes a segment. The smaller the fretboard radius, the more noticeably curved the fretboard is. Most modern guitars feature a 12" neck radius, while older guitars from the 1960s and 1970s usually feature a 6-8" neck radius. Pinching a string against a fret on fretboard effectively shortens the vibrating length of the string, producing a higher pitch. Fretboards are most commonly
Bass guitar the strings, and extending the lower string scales allows the string to produce harmonics that are more in tune with the fundamental. To keep proper pitch across all frets in a multi-scale bass guitar, a fanned fret design is applied to the fingerboard. In this case, the frets extend from the neck of the instrument at an angle, in contrast to the standard perpendicular arrangement in standard neck designs, in which the fret spacing is wider for the long scale and closer for the short scale. This is not to be confused with perfect intonation across the whole neck, which