Good Morning. I'm Paul. I'm curious about the replacement neck for the JZ-6. Thinking of purchasing it for a build. Has anyone used one for a Baritone/ BassVI build?
Printable View
Good Morning. I'm Paul. I'm curious about the replacement neck for the JZ-6. Thinking of purchasing it for a build. Has anyone used one for a Baritone/ BassVI build?
There are two types of baritone necks, ‘conversion’ ones designed for fitting to existing guitars, and those made for purpose-built baritone bodies. The JZ-6 neck is one of the latter and the description does say it is not suitable for use with standard Pit Bull kits.
A 30” baritone has a 4.5” longer scale length than a standard Fender. On a conversion neck, the body dimension can’t change, so all the extra length goes on the neck. The bigger scale length increases the distance between frets, but for a 21-fret neck, you’d still end up with a length of fretboard with no frets on, so extra frets are normally added to fill the gap.
On a neck for a dedicated baritone guitar, the extra scale length is shared between the body and the neck, roughly 1/3:2/3. So the bridge is moved back a bit and the pickups spaced out more, whilst the neck normally keeps the same number of frets as the standard scale version (if there is one).
So the JZ-6 30” neck is fine if you are building a scratch body, or fitting it to an existing 30” baritone bolt-on neck body, but if you try and fit it to a standard scale body, the overall scale length will be short by 1” to 1.5” and it will sound awful.