Boy, you sure don’t hear enough about this sort of thing. Paul Rubenstein is an NYC-based elementary school teacher who teaches music to his students in a clever way. They make guitars together. Previous classes have constructed more-or-less standard guitars. No doubt loads of fun for kids. This year, however, he did something just a smidge cooler. He and his students made guitars with adjustable frets. This way, you can include only frets to play the right notes for a particular scale. Voila! No clams. (Although wrong notes are plenty of fun too.) Here’s what Paul has to say about it:

The advantage of movable frets is that we can set the frets so that all the available notes are in the scale we want (no wrong notes) and we have access to all the notes… not only the ones in the standard 12 tone even-tempered scale of contemporary Western music. We took the opportunity to explore scales from non-Western cultures, and purely experimental scales, including ones the kids came up with themselves.

Yes, Paul, I’m sure all the children loved to explore the music of other cultures, but, more fun to little ears, I would imagine, is that ability to play microtonally, which has all kinds of horrible noise-making potential.

Check out a performance by his students at the Urban Arts Festival, put on by his elementary school:

Neat stuff, no? Well played, Mr. Rubenstein. Well played.