What is a Headless Guitar and Why Guitarists Should Use It

If you are new to the guitar industry, you must try learning your lessons with a lightweight guitar. For this, you should use a headless guitar.  

What is a Headless Guitar?

A headless guitar refers to a guitar without a headstock. Depending on your individual choice and music requirements, you may get a headless bass in different designs. However, each instrument relocates the tuning machine heads across the guitar’s bridge area or the string’s ball ends before its nut. 

How Headless Guitar differs from Traditional Bass/Guitar

A traditional bass guitar or travel bass guitar has fixed strings at its tailpiece. Moreover, these guitars have a cross-over on the nut and the bridge while going down the neck. The guitar strings also remain wound across the tuning pegs. In this way, guitarists may adjust the tension to tune the strings. Besides, the tuning pegs stay mounted on the guitar head.    

A headless bass guitar reverses the structure so that its strings remain fixed beyond its nut. In this way, you do not need a guitar head. Later, the strings cross over on the guitar nut, go above the neck, over the guitar bridge and stay connected to guitar tuners. 

Even though both guitars give the same result, a few players experience changes while playing their instruments, as the chords or fretting notes across the nut affect their existing fret-hand techniques. In this situation, guitarists have to learn a few things while adjusting strings, frets, and other players before playing a headless bass or guitar. 

Why Use a Headless Bass Guitar

Absent of tuning pegs 

If anyone asks why headless bass, we should say, a headless guitar does not contain tuning pegs. Indeed, you do not turn and twist the pegs accidentally or turn them after you bump into objects. 

Anchored strings 

A headless instrument has its guitar strings anchored in two different positions. If we talk of a traditional guitar, it has strings anchored on the instrument’s bridge. Besides, the strings of a regular guitar stay connected to its headstock by using tuning pegs and string posts. 

However, the composition causes excessive tension between the headstock and the bridge to pull the guitar strings. The tension rotates its tuning pegs incrementally resulting in loosening of the strings and going out from its original tune. Other than tuning stability, the headless guitar has reduced tension so that you may fret its strings easily without hurting your fingers and hands. 

Stable tuning knob

According to reviews related to Geddy Lee why use a headless bass guitar, a headless bridge has stable tuning knobs as compared to tuning pegs. Indeed, they contribute many benefits to a headless instrument. 

Perfect for traveling guitarist

Do you want a travel guitar for your international music concerts? Go with a headless instrument, as it does not have a headstock to reduce its length by approximately 7 inches. In particular, you have to consider a headless guitar if you have to travel on flights, as they have limitations in size for any overhead compartment. 

Maintains balance 

Guitars and basses equipped with the headstock cause imbalances, which are prone to neck problems and neck dives. In contrast, headless instruments shift the tuners to their other ends to develop balanced instruments. In this way, your neck always stays in its position and you do not experience neck pain after playing the instrument. 

Reduction in sympathetic resonance- main point of a headless bass guitar 

If you still want to know what the point of a headless bass is, we should say that it reduces sympathetic resonance. The phenomenon causes vibration in surrounding strings when you pluck a particular guitar string and touch any other open string lightly. In other words, you experience and witness sympathetic vibration. Reduction of sympathetic resonance is essential, as it leads to a clear guitar tone. 

A regular headstock guitar has many strings, which run between the tuning machines and the nuts to increase the probability of sympathetic resonance. On the other hand, in a headless guitar, the headpiece and the nut are at a small distance with the fastening of a string at its one end. Indeed, the combination causes less vibration followed by less sympathetic resonance as compared to a headstock guitar. Hence, the result will be a clear tone. 

Conclusion

Headless guitars are a boon for travel guitarists and newbies of the guitar industry. If you want a lightweight, tone stable, less resonance-based guitar, you must go with headless instruments.

Take a look at the amazing build quality of headless guitars at the store of Bootlegger Guitar, place near Hermosa Beach, California. Also, we have a option of online store at www.bootleggerguitar.com from where you can explore our guitars collection and also can buy a guitar or its accessories if needed.