Play microtones on the guitar or bass today with these 6 pre-made instruments
A few years ago, if you wanted a guitar that could play notes in between the notes, you basically had two options: take a hammer to your own fretboard, or commission a custom build from a luthier and wait six months. That’s no longer the case. Several manufacturers and small builders now sell microtonal guitars and basses you can actually order online and have on your doorstep within weeks.
If “microtonal” is a new word to you, here’s the short version. Standard guitars divide the octave into 12 equal steps, each one a semitone (100 cents) apart. Microtonal music uses smaller intervals than that, the most common being quarter tones (50 cents). This is the foundation of Turkish maqam music, much of Arabic and Persian music, Indian classical music, and a steadily growing chunk of Western experimental rock — King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard being the obvious gateway band for most listeners.
Different microtonal guitars take wildly different approaches. Some add a few extra frets in strategic places. Some replace the entire fretboard with a brand new tuning system. Some let you move the frets around. Here are six instruments worth knowing about, in roughly increasing order of how committed you have to be to a single tuning.
1. Çoğulu Adjustable Microtonal Guitar
Designed in 2008 by Turkish classical guitarist and professor Tolgahan Çoğulu, the Adjustable Microtonal Guitar (AMG) is the most flexible microtonal instrument on the market, and it’s the one to start with for that reason. Instead of frets glued into the fretboard, the AMG has individual channels routed under each string. Each fret is a small piece of metal that slides along its channel and can be locked in place anywhere you want.
What that means in practice: a single instrument can be set up for 24-EDO quarter tones one day, 19-EDO the next, Turkish maqam tunings after that, and a just intonation scale by the weekend. You can even pull frets out entirely under one string and leave them in under the others, which is impossible on a normal guitar.
Çoğulu’s company, Microtonal Guitar Music Technologies, sells complete adjustable electric guitars (Stratocaster-style), bass guitars (Jazz Bass-style), classical guitars, and ukuleles, plus replacement necks and fretboards if you want to convert an instrument you already own. Complete electric and bass models currently sit around €3,000. They ship from Turkey worldwide. This is the option to buy if you don’t yet know which tuning system you want to commit to — because you don’t have to.
2. Eastwood Hi-Flier Phase 4 MT
The Eastwood Hi-Flier MT is probably the most accessible “off the shelf” microtonal electric guitar on the market right now. It’s a Canadian-made replica of the early-1970s Univox Hi-Flier (the same model Kurt Cobain played in the “Heart-Shaped Box” video), but with 32 frets instead of the usual 22 — every standard fret is there, with one extra fret added between each pair. That gives you a full 24-EDO quarter-tone layout, the exact system King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard use across the Flying Microtonal Banana, K.G. and L.W. albums.
Because all the original 12-tone fret positions are preserved, you can still play every chord and scale you already know — the new frets just give you extra notes between them when you want them. Eastwood has expanded the lineup since the Hi-Flier with the SG2C Flying Banana MT and the Lizard MT (designed by Zac Eccles, the Australian luthier who built the original Flying Microtonal Banana for Stu Mackenzie), so there’s a body shape for most preferences. Prices are in the low four figures USD.
3. FreeNote Music 19-EDO Guitar
FreeNote Music has been selling microtonal guitars since 1996, run by guitarist and composer Jon Catler, and they have an exclusive partnership with G&L Guitars (the company Leo Fender founded after Fender). You can order any G&L body fitted with a FreeNote microtonal neck, or just buy the neck separately and bolt it to a Fender-style body you already have.
The 19-EDO neck divides the octave into 19 equal steps instead of 12. That sounds like more complexity, but in practice 19-EDO is one of the easiest microtonal systems to learn because almost every chord shape and scale from standard tuning still works — you just have a different number of frets per octave. The trade-off is that 19-EDO has noticeably sweeter major thirds and minor thirds than 12-EDO, and you get a handful of new intervals that aren’t possible in standard tuning at all. FreeNote also sells 31-EDO necks, just intonation necks, fretless guitars, and a “12-Tone Ultra Plus” system that keeps all the standard frets and adds extra ones at the 7th, 11th, and 13th harmonics. Necks start around $749 USD.
4. Eastwood Warren Ellis MT Bass
Up until very recently, microtonal basses essentially did not exist at production scale — if you wanted one, you had a custom luthier do it. Eastwood changed that in March 2026 with the Warren Ellis MT, their first-ever microtonal bass. It’s a 30.5-inch short-scale bass with a 27-fret microtonal fingerboard, an alder body, a Warren Ellis Blade pickup, and a vintage-style adjustable bridge. Pre-order pricing through Eastwood’s Guitstarter program is $999 USD, which makes it by a wide margin the cheapest production microtonal bass ever offered.
If you’ve been waiting to do quarter-tone bass lines without resorting to a fretless or to manual refretting, this is the instrument that finally makes that practical. It’s worth noting that Çoğulu’s company also sells a complete adjustable microtonal Jazz Bass, but at roughly three times the price, so the Eastwood is the entry-level option.
5. Sala Muzik Microtonal Classical Guitar KG
If you’re more interested in maqam music — the Turkish, Arabic, and Persian traditions that microtonal Western rock borrows from — then a guitar designed specifically for that repertoire makes more sense than a full 24-EDO instrument. Sala Muzik, based in Istanbul, sells a nylon-string classical model called the Microtonal Classical Guitar KG (designed in collaboration with Tolgahan Çoğulu) that adds extra frets only at the positions you actually need for Middle Eastern scales: between the 2nd and 3rd, 4th and 5th, 5th and 6th, 7th and 8th, 9th and 10th, 11th and 12th, 14th and 15th, 16th and 17th, and 17th and 18th frets.
The result is a guitar that’s still very comfortable to play standard chords and scales on — the fretboard isn’t crowded with extra frets everywhere — but gives you immediate access to the neutral seconds and neutral thirds that define a maqam like Hüseyni or Bayati. Sala Muzik also sells more elaborate models like the KG-5 (with a cutaway and a built-in pickup/EQ) and an adjustable-fret CK-5 if you want to experiment with multiple tunings.
6. Meantone Guitar Adjustable Microtonal Guitar
A second adjustable system worth knowing about is from Meantone Guitar. Where Çoğulu’s design uses individual channels routed under each string, Meantone Guitar’s neck and fretboard are precision-engraved with a complete set of 72-TET gridlines — that is, 72 possible fret positions per octave. You insert small color-coded “fretlets” into the gridlines wherever you want them, and the kit comes with a small set of luthier tools (pliers, scriber, fret tuner) so you can reconfigure the instrument yourself.
72-EDO is a useful resolution because it’s a high-precision approximation of just intonation: you can get inside about 3 cents of any pure harmonic interval up through the 11th harmonic, and you can also use it as a superset of 12-EDO and 24-EDO (since 72 is divisible by both 12 and 24). Meantone Guitar sells the bare adjustable fretboard, complete necks (Strat- and Tele-compatible), and full handbuilt acoustic and classical guitars (the Colin Keefe model). It’s a useful alternative or complement to the Çoğulu system, especially if you want a fretboard that’s already pre-marked with fine-grained reference points for tuning experiments.
Where to go from here
If you’ve never played microtonal guitar before, the practical advice is: start with a 24-EDO instrument (the Eastwood Hi-Flier MT or one of the Sala Muzik models). It’s the most beginner-friendly microtonal system because every note you already know is still there in the same place, and the new notes are just a fret away. You can learn the new sounds gradually, in the context of music you already understand.
If you fall down the rabbit hole and want to go further, that’s when an adjustable instrument or a 19-EDO/31-EDO build starts to make sense. And if you want to read more theory before spending the money, the Xenharmonic Wiki is the best free resource on the internet — there’s an article for almost every tuning system mentioned in this post, and the microguitar page has a much longer list of luthiers and one-off builds than I’ve covered here.
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