As a guitar player and professional repair technician with extensive experience, I had grown dissatisfied with the performance of instruments as they existed. My repair experience led me to examine scale length as a possible solution.
Fret placement is a ratio based on scale length so longer scales have more distance between frets.
Scale Length influences both the tonal quality of the notes produced and the tension of the string at a paticular pitch. The tonal effects of scale length are crucial to the final tone of the instrument. They do not produce tone of their own and only modify input from the vibrating string. If paticular harmonics are very strong, or altogether absent, those characteristics will be present in the final tone of the instrument. Looking inside a grand piano, or at a harp, we see that the string lengths vary with the pitches of the strings.