24th fret / neck pickup

[brian]

New to forum - figured this would be the place to ask a technical question. Non-HM Strats never have more than 22 frets. The reason given is that the neck pickup has to be exactly placed to optimally sense the harmonics from the strings, so you can’t just push the neck pickup farther down towards the bridge. That being the case, there is no room for a 23rd or 24th fret above a properly positioned neck pickup.
So the question is: how does the 24 fret design of the HM Strat escape this issue? Was it decided that it was more important to have 24 frets than for the neck pickup to be optimally positioned? Does the shortened HM scale length has anything to do with this?

[heem6]

Those are really good questions, Brian. Maybe someone else will come along with more information.

Not totally relevant, but I remember EVH once mentioning in an interview that there is a precise spot he likes to put his neck pickups and it has to be exact to hit the sweet spot.

[rickoshay]

To me, locating a pickup at exactly the 24th fret would:
1. Be a bad location for playing open strings, as you are likely to get destructive wave interference in the strings at that location, reducing output (but increasing harmonics relative to the fundamental note).
2. Be completely irrelevant when playing fretted notes, as it woudl no longer be at the same point on the active length of the string.

As it was, they did not push the neck pickup cavity far enough down on the HMS strat, as I have seen more than one crack form the neck pocket into the neck cavity route on the bass side. Not sure how hard to fix - might be able to just wick some glue down into it.