I picked up a YJM strat about a week ago. Oh man are scalloped boards a trip. And after playing this thing non stop since then, I think I’ve figured out scalloped fretboards, at least a little bit. It was not easy to play at first. The strings felt like they were cutting into my fingers, and I didn’t realize how much the fretboard on other guitars acted as an anchor point. The whole thing felt alien at first.
After not too much time though, I started to get it. And it turns out I really like the guitar, but for different reasons than I thought I originally thought I would.
The first big thing I'd like to address is what I believe to be the biggest misconception about what people think scalloped boards do. The most common thing I’ve heard people say about scalloped boards is that they think it makes you play faster. The answer to that is "kind of, but not in the way you're thinking." When you hear that scalloped boards make you play faster, the intuitive thing to think is that a scalloped board must make you immediately “play faster“ like in the same way a trampoline makes you immediately “jump higher,” like maybe the extra deep cutaway wood puts less drag on your fingers or something, or maybe your fingers maybe bounce off the strings in a way they don't on normal guitars, etc. That’s not the way it works.
Scalloped boards don’t directly
make you play faster, they
teach you to play faster.
They teach you to play faster through negative reinforcement. If you play inefficiently (too much finger pressure), the strings dig into your fingers which isn’t fun and the notes go sharp so it sounds terrible, so you quickly learn to use only as much pressure as necessary to fret the note and no more. This subsequently means the act of moving to the next note doesn’t take as much effort either, because you don’t have to release as much pressure to move off the that first note, so you’re able move to the next note faster, etc.
Negative reinforcement aside though, the ability to really get under the strings and get wild with bending is really fun by itself.
And as far as the YJM strat goes, scalloped board aside, the pickups are probably the best high gain strat pickups I’ve heard. They’re loud and they have a ton of mids so they translate to distortion really well, but they still have a super clear, stringy quality to them that is 100% strat all day long. My main, homebase kind of sound is more of a standard bridge humbucker into tight distortion, but this is an excellent alternative flavor I think.
After playing this thing for about a week, I'm starting to think the Fender YJM strat is kind of the platonic ideal of the SSS high gain strat. I really like it.
