Making a nut for playing slide guitar
I recently mentioned to a friend of mine that I was thinking of making a new nut for my acoustic guitar, and he generously donated a couple of nut blanks. One is ebony and the other is Corian. I will use the ebony one to make the new standard nut (which will no doubt be covered in a future blog entry), but decided to make a raised nut with the Corian for when I want to play slide guitar. Corian, incidentally, is a material that is most commonly used on the surfaces of kitchen units, but has also been used by both Gibson and Martin to make nuts. It is not the best material, tonally-speaking (though it’s hardly crap), but it is easy to work with. More info about Corian can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corian One of the bonuses of a raised nut for playing slide guitar is that it will be flat, rather than radiused, so no need to work out exact curvature, etc., and since it will be raised off the fretboard, there is no need to worry about precise height measurements. That cou...