When people hear that McNaught guitars are built with "SET-THRU" NECK® construction, they usually don't get too excited. After all, they think, set neck neck through I've heard it all before.. nothing new, right?
Well wrong! Maybe if we changed the name to incredibly-innovative-all-new-all-different-deep-pocket-augmented-extension-neck-mounting- technique-to-increase-and-improve-sustain-volume-and-tone-like-nothing-you've-ever-heard-or-played-before, they'd get a better idea of what the "SET-THRU" NECK® is all about.
Hmmmm.Somehow Set-Thru Neck seems to flow a bit better I guess there's a bit of explaining to do.
"SET-THRU" NECK®: in these words lies the secret of a revolutionary technique that has been painstakingly perfected as one of the cornerstones of McNaught quality. It's so amazingly simple, and at the same time, so intricately dependent on unique experience and specialized skill, that I can tell you all about it here without spilling the beans on what's actually a trade secret.
Background: a neck-through guitar is one like the original Les Paul (The Plank). It's a full length neck with body wings glued on. A set neck on the other hand is simply a neck that's glued tight into a fitted socket. The "SET-THRU" NECK® is a combination of the set-neck (Gibson, PRS) and the neck-thru (Jackson, ESP). It keeps a whopping TWELVE INCHES of neck INSIDE the body cavity for amazing tone transfer and sustain, without the sound-sapping (and ugly) necessity for the body to be made of multiple pieces of glued-together wood.
When I first began building guitars, they all were built using a standard set neck. I had read an interview with another guitar company that talked about how their neck extended more than 5" into the guitar body. I read another interview with another guitar company that said their neck extended even deeper. However, when I investigated these guitrs, I found a problem. The Gibson Nashville Tune-O-Matic bridge is elevated from the guitar body to such an extent that the neck needs to be angled back up to 6 degrees. To make this possible against a flat body, the deep set-neck guitars of the past were built in such a way that the butt of the neck was unable to make much contact with the body pocket.
Common sense told me that a good mechanical junction of the neck-butt and the body pocket was critical if maximum sound energy is to be transferred between the two primary parts of the instrument. Think of it like this: would you feel more vibration from an engine in if you pressed on the hood of a car with one finger or with your entire palm?
Eureka! My theory was that it would make more sense to somehow get my 12" extension into the body at a uniform depth. To the drawing board I went. After several months of experiments and designs, I was able to come up with a set of custom jigs that would allow me to tool a 12" neck extension at uniform depth through transverse section of the guitar body.
I swear that from this sentence forward, I will speak to you as one guitar player to another. No more shop talk.
