It's my understanding that fall away is pretty much only important on acoustic guitars, where there's a tendency for the fingerboard to turn up at the extension, the part that's past the neck joint and is attached to the soundboard. We don't see that ski-jump much on bolt-neck guitars, since there's no extension past the heel. If you envision the geometry on a Fender style guitar, I imagine taking the upper frets down and lowering the saddle height gets a similar result to leveling the frets even and keeping the saddle where it's at, in other words, you end up with the same string height over the frets at any given point. Unless you're taking the upper frets down at a curve (as viewed from the side), which seems a lot like what would happen if you remove relief from the neck using the truss rod. This would result in your action ending up pretty high when you're playing higher up the neck, as it does on an acoustic with some fall away.Despot wrote:The other thing that you'll see being discussed is 'fall off' ...
As you fret further up the neck, the amplitude of the string's vibration decreases for a given playing pressure, since the string gets shorter while the pitch gets higher; past the 12th fret you need less room for the vibrating string. However, it has been my personal, anecdotal experience with modern Fenders that if there is a high fret, it's usually pretty high up, in the 15-19 range. Not sure why that is; on lots of other instruments we see it in the 5-9 range, where it seems more likely for a fret to pop out with flex. Maybe they pay less attention to dressing up there in the factory? But Fenders seem to be pretty decent stock.
It's also possible that I completely misunderstand what you're describing, in which case please ignore me.
