How to Set-Up Your Guitar

This is, unsurprisingly, one of those “how-to” articles where hopefully you will learn how to properly set-up a guitar. It is possible to just hand your guitar over to a guy in a guitar shop and say “Please Set-up my Guitar”, he will probably respond with something like “OK, that’ll be £20 please, and you can pick up your guitar in about two weeks”- or something along those lines. So, this guide is aimed at people who, like me, are too cheap to pay or can’t even go two days without a guitar- if this is you, please read on!

This Article will be focused on setting the action of your guitar, stay tuned for further articles dealing with other aspects of guitar set-up (hint: email update option in the bar to the left).

Warp-Speed, or Warped Neck?

First, lift your guitar so that you’re looking at the base, along the neck. The neck should be ever so slightly curved so that the action (aka distance between strings and frets) is closer near the nut (the thing between the neck and head) and furthest away near the 12th fret. It should follow a smooth curve. The curve of the neck should be barely noticeable, so if it is too pronounced, or if it seems to “wobble” in some areas of the curve, your guitar neck may have warped.

A guitar with a warped neck requires something called a “truss rod adjustment”, which really is something best left to professionals as doing it wrong could snap the neck! So, hopefully that hasn’t happened and your guitar just needs some fine-tuning. This method will also not work so well if you have a floating bridge.

You Will Need

• 1 Set of Allen Keys- or at least one that fits the Allen key sockets on your guitar (they may be different sizes).
• 1 Guitar Tuner- when adjusting the intonation of a guitar, we will need to keep re-tuning it (no point fixing the intonation of an already out-of-tune guitar!
• 1 Pair of Ears- if you can’t find two ears, one will do- or if the ears you already have aren’t so good, you can borrow someone else’s.
• 1 Brain- again, if you don’t own one yourself, someone else’s will do.
• 1 Pair of eyes- this one is important! If you don’t have your own set of eyes (how are you reading this?), please get someone else to do this for you!
• 1 Screwdriver.

So, provided you have all the above equipment available, start by playing the open E string (either one will work, but we’re going to start with the thickest). We are going to adjust the action of the guitar.

Guitar Action

A Guitar’s “action” or “string height” is the distance between the guitar fretboard and the strings. It is important that the strings aren’t so high off the neck that the guitar is hard to play, but they also can’t be so low as to buzz on the frets.

In order to make the guitar as playable as possible, we want to have a low action. How low depends on the design of the guitar, but also on the style of the player. If your style of playing involves alot of bluesy bends you may want the action a little higher than someone who wants to play as fast as possible. This is because, with an action that is too low, the strings can “cut out” on the frets (or otherwise create “fretbuzz”) when you bend; with an action that is too high, however, there is more distance between string and fret- which takes slightly longer to play as a slightly longer distance is involved (as speed = distance/time).

So, I normally start by lowering the string quite far (this is assuming you are starting from scratch, if you think the action on your guitar is fine, you can skip this). Lower the string by unscrewing the screw from the bridge saddle (the part of the bridge that each string goes over), it should be located somewhere on the “top” of the bridge (i.e. facing away from the body). Sometimes there is just one screw on each side- as is the case with Les Pauls and similar models- or sometimes there is a different set of screws for each string- as is the case with Strat-style guitars.

Fretbuzz

If you have separate sections for each string you can lower each string individually and then raise it up to a point where it doesn’t buzz on the frets. There should be no buzz when you play the open string, the first fret, the 5th fret, the 12th fret and the 17th-24th frets. If you have only one screw on each side of the bridge, then you need to adjust the three bass strings (the thicker ones) separate to the three treble strings (the thinner ones). Always check each string for buzz along its length, and when you think you have the action right, play the guitar and there should be no fretbuzz (include bends etc, because they are affected by string height). If you bend a string and you hear a buzz, that means that the action should be higher on that string. Make sure the strings are at the correct height before you start with the intonation, as the intonation of your guitar is affected by the height of the strings (doing things the other way around will just undo all your hard work!).

Next, we will be looking at setting the guitars intonation.

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November 11, 2009 at 11:52 am | Equipment and Maintenance, Featured, How to | 2 comments

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