Beautiful Music and Beautiful Wood

[A. Secular Human]

The problem with instruments of these sort is that they hog up bandwidth. If you use them to their full scope, there's very little sonic room for any other instruments. Keyboard instruments get around this by their unique ASDR envelopes, either acoustic or electronic, but stringed instruments with overlapping ranges clutter a mix and make mud, unless you're playing solo.

For what it’s worth, it seems like Garry Goodman’s 12-string bass seems to be for solo performances. Maybe accompanied by a drum kit, but not much else. When you’ve got a bass with all the range of a Bösenforfer Imperial (yes, even more than a regular 88-key piano) at your hands, one probably doesn’t need much else. Of course, maybe the Chapman Stick style he seems to use on that bass changes the ASDR envelope enough to make bandwidth less of a problem, at least if King Crimson’s any indication.

Interesting.  I don't think "funk", when I hear the name King Crimson.

[h4ym4n]

Basically a hand held horizontal harp. 

I’d have a stand made. Or an exoskeleton

Yeah, I would play it sitting down, with a leg rest, and do so  tapping on the fretboard unless I really needed a thumping tone.

Four strut rods, wonder if one piece or four necks packed close together?

Still cool as all heck

[h4ym4n]

After looking again it looks like it has to be one piece.

Again I guess it doesn’t matter being a harp

[Thumpalumpacus]

After looking again it looks like it has to be one piece.

Again I guess it doesn’t matter being a harp

One might play it as a harp, sure. One might play it simply by tapping upon the strings/frets which supply the required note. It's a common guitar technique and has been adopted by bassists too. It really depends on what timbre you want to evoke, because different styles of attack yield different sonic results.

The neck itself could be one board, or several long pieces glued laterally. The latter would probably be better in construction so long as the grain of the pieces of wood are arranged to counteract the torque imparted by such a broad disparity of tensions across such a wide range of strings.

In other words, some strips cross-grain, some length-wise, some with back-bow, all supported by truss-rods, in order to keep such a wide, thin piece of wood from twisting.

My #1 guitar right now has a three-piece neck. The pieces run length-wise along the neck. The two outer pieces run the grain parallel to the string in order to prevent the neck bowing (binding to the front of the guitar, towards the strings). The center strip is cut and glued cross-grain in order to prevent the neck from twisting out of true.

I doubt one-piece construction, even with truss-rods, would support the combined tension of all those strings without moving around. Even if it dd, it would be a maintenance nightmare.