[Matty22]

I met a friend of a friend today, who, well to say the least, is a Yngwie wanna be..

He was playing a strat (marked as fender, but who knows), with a scallopped neck. I did some googling once i got home, and found that Yngwie has had this done to one of his strats, and apparently Richie Blakemore (deep purple) does it too...

But it was REALLY interesting to play it, unfortunately i didnt get any photos of it.
As best as i can explain it, the neck has been "scallopped" or carved out, between the frets, so you dont actually touch the neck when playing, (i barely have to on my guitar anyway), i didnt really notice any difference in playing it, but that could well be because i suck, lol....

How common is this? id never heard of it, and felt like a fair dinkum halfwit when i said a "smart" comment like "gee, you've must really push down on them strings eh"...

[allthumbs]

They are pretty specialized necks. Stricktly for a wheedlee style guitar. I know a couple of people who have them. They were more popular back in the early metal days. Metal virtuosos dug them for a while.

[Ultimate Garage Band]

To scallop the neck means you're removing wood between the frets. It adds a bit to the cost of the guitar. Then somebody came up w/the idea of just putting bigger frets on the guitar to achieve the same thing and the extra jumbo fret was born and thus installed on most 80's shred machine guitars.

[cshude]

I just saw one for the first time just yesterday. Looks cool, but I didn't bother playing it.

[Cedric01]

You need a light touch on those frets otherwise the tuning will go out-of-wack. Rusty Cooley prefers extra jumbo frets.

[Blacksheep547]

Usually luthiers do that kind of job. I think fender has the Malmsteen signature and it comes with the scallopped neck. The only advantage of the scallopped neck is that you can bend the strings easier and also have more sustain.

I once saw an interview they made to malmsteen and he said that that was the only reason why he switched to scallopped, but it made shredding harder.