Guitar neck profiles explained: find your perfect playing partner

Close up of a through neck guitar
(Image credit: Future)

You’re going to spend the majority of your time with your hand on your guitar's neck, so ensuring a comfortable platform for your playing style is vital to being the best player possible. Trying different guitar neck profiles is all part of becoming a complete guitarist and until you do try, you’ll never know the playing benefits you might be missing out on when it comes to the different shapes available.

Your guitar is a sum of many parts. Some of these parts garner our attention and adulation whilst others don’t. Guitarists will talk for days about pickups - and rightly so - but it feels to us as though not as much fuss is made about the neck profile. So why is neck profile so important? And why should you understand the differences between them? Let's find out.

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Matt McCracken
Junior Deals Writer

Matt is a Junior Deals Writer here at Guitar World. He regularly tests and reviews music gear with a focus on guitars, amps, pedals, modelers, and pretty much anything else guitar-related. Matt worked in music retail for 5 years at Dawsons Music and Northwest Guitars and has written for various music sites including MusicRadar, Guitar Player, Guitar.com, Ultimate Guitar, and Thomann’s t.blog. A regularly gigging guitarist with over 20 years of experience playing live and writing and recording in bands, he's performed everything from jazz to djent, gigging all over the country in more dingy venues than you can shake a drop-tuned guitar at.