I know the 6105 are taller and thinner than the medium jumbos but is it true you can more sustain, tone and put heavier gauge strings on with the taller frets (6105)?

The '72 Pawn Shop Strat has 6105's. I played it again the other day. I like the U neck but wasn't crazy with the taller frets. I don't know about sustain or string gauge. You should hunt down a '72 and give it a try.

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I've played SRV signature a lot in the past and it has 6105 frets. There's a guitar with amazing tone but i think it comes pretty much from the thick oval neck, which is incredible. Also the texas specials doesn't hurt but now i'm talking about the feel without electricity.

- RG

My main guitar has 6105 frets, and while they certainly make playing easier for me, i don't think the height of the fret has any effect on string tone... certainly not when compared to how you, individually, fret the string.

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I put them on all my guitars. I think it does have a different tone, but i dont know if id say it adds any sustain. Maybe if you were playing on something that had really low frets, and your finger tip kept pressing on the fretboard you would because with the new taller frets you wouldnt be coming in contact witht the fretboard, but Im just speculating.
I think they change the attack though; you have less string surface on the narrow/tall frets than you would on tall/wide jumbo

I don't know technically what they are called, but those huge frets are the reason I chose my MIM Tele over the Highway 1 model I had gone to the dealer to look at. The Highway 1 had some kind of Super-Duper Humongous frets on it that made the neck feel like a series of very tall speed bumps when I ran my hand down it. Took me less than five minutes to decide, Nope. Not for me. The neck on the MIM, on the other hand, felt like it was a part of my hand and sounded great, to boot. The rest, as they say, is history.

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"It's about sound and sound alone. Looks are irrelevant. You can have the best-looking guitar on earth, but if the sound isn't there it is nothing more than a beautiful piece of trash. The sound it makes is the soul of any guitar."

I think that as far as sustain goes, your tremolo block has a lot more to do with that than your frets/strings go. But if you're talking about sustain bending, then yes, bigger frets prevent the string from fretting out and it's easier to bend and easier to hold the bend longer.

I've been playing around with string gauges for a while. I've done everything from regular 9's all the way up to 12-56s. If you're tuned to Eb Standard like SRV or Hendrix than you can get away with the 12-56s and survive. If you aren't, than I found that 11's were about the maximum I could take in standard tuning. But right now on my Strats I'm running either regular 10's in standard or my favorite, 10-52s in standard. With 10-52s you get regular 10's for the e, b and g (which make bending easier), but you get the equivalent of 12's for the d, a and low e. So you can still hit hard and get chunky rhythms, but not kill yourself bending. Of course, I have worn medium jumbos on my Strats. If I had taller frets I might go heavier than 10-52s.

As far as tone goes, there is a difference. Heavier strings do sound better to my ears but they aren't so much better than I would sacrifice too much in the way of playability for them. Not unless you want to play jazz, but that's a completely different story. A lot of the tone lost on smaller strings can be made up with EQ adjustments to your amp, pickups, things of that nature that actually factor more into your tone than your strings do (it is an electric guitar after all). And of course, getting a gauge which you can actually play is most important since most of your tone is your hands anyway.

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I had the 6105 frets on a '59 Thinskin Strat I bought from Wildwood,I had played a guitar before and thought they were okay and I would get used to them,wrong!!...I hated them ,so much that I was trying to figure out whether to replace the frets or maybe even the neck...I found a great luthier/tech in the Nashville area and talked to him,he wanted to file them down and recrown them to see how I liked that,now I love them they feel a lot more like vintage frets and the guy does perfect work,he does work for lots of professional guitarists including the guitar player for Taylor Swift,I know why,the guy is a first rate craftsman.
needless to say 6105 frets are NOT for me...although others love them....and that my friends is called "personal preference".

You're right about the block having more to do with sustain, but i was coming from a place where you have real worn vintage style frets, actually they dont even have to be all that worn. But before I replaced my neck, i had that severe 7 1/4" radius w/vintage frets. i used 11's tuned to standard pitch, and they ate away at the middle of the frets where the D and G string would travel during a bend. After a while, it looked like frets 5-12 were almost reradiused they were so worn. In that case, I'd find my finger overlaping the string and pressing against the wood from the fretboard. So it was like the string didnt have as good a purchase on the fret if it was higher.
The 6105's arent "that" much different fromt the small ones, just a bit taller, thats why I got them. A bit more meat to work with, but without loosing the spaces between the frets. If you look at the higher register frets on a guitar with jumbos, sometimes you have to wonder how they get their finger in there enough to fret it properly.

I did the string gauge dance for a while. 9.5s to 10s, then 11,s, then 12's tuned to Eb and 11's at standard. If its one of the most dramatic changes you can make to your tone; strings and picks. I went down to 10s for a while because I was playing stuff i needed to be able to move around faster, but the tone difference was huge. I ended up splitting the baby. I use a set of hybrids 10/11 gauge, but not light top,heavy bottoms. I use the low E, A, and "G" string from a set of 11's, and the D, B and high E from a set of 10's, Nickle Rockers. Its a good compramise. The strings that I want to sound the thickest; E A and G, do, and the strings i need a lighter guage for more legato are lighter.
I dont like jumbos at all though. I use compounded radius now. I didnt think Id like it on the first neck I did, I was so use to a straight radius, and a narrow one at that, but I was pleasantly surprised that you really cant feel the difference. But you can bend 2 1/2-3 steps without having the note choke out.