Nut (string instrument)

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The nut of a string instrument is a small piece of hard material which supports the strings at the end closest to the headstock or scroll. The nut marks one end of the speaking length of each open string, sets the spacing of the strings across the neck, and usually holds the strings at the proper height from the fingerboard. Along with the bridge, the nut defines the vibrating lengths (scale lengths) of the open strings.

Violin nut.jpg Violin

Mandolin nut.jpg Mandolin

Guitar nut.jpg Guitar

Qian Jin.jpg Erhu

The nut may be made of ebony, ivory, bone, or plastic, and is usually notched or grooved for the strings. The grooves are designed to lead the string from the fingerboard to the headstock or pegbox in a smooth curve, to prevent damage to the strings or their windings. Bowed string instruments in particular benefit from an application of soft pencil graphite in the notches of the nut, to preserve the delicate flat windings of their strings.

Not all string instruments have nuts as described:

• Some guitars and mandolins, for example, have nuts that are just string spacers, with deep notches. These instruments use a zero fret, which is a fret, at the beginning of the scale where a normal nut would be, that's higher than the other frets to provide the correct string clearance. This is usually found on cheaper instruments, as it's much easier to set up an instrument this way; to make a proper nut requires that each string notch be carefully cut to the proper depth so that the string is neither too high nor buzzes against the frets on account of being too low. With a zero fret, the "nut" fret merely needs to be the right height.

• The erhu does not use a hard nut to define the speaking length of the open string, but rather a qiān jin (千斤) : a loop of string, or, less commonly, a metal hook.cs:Ořech (nástroj)

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