About Guitars
Guitars (especially electric guitars) are far more complex than we imagine.
Once we become ‘guitarists’ we get this idea that we are also Luthiers, and that we can do our own guitar modifications. I mean, I haven a degree in Engineering, how hard can it be right? Well, harder than you think.
String Action (height)
The very first thing most beginners will ask is, how can I get the strings to go lower. I mean it must be this high action that’s stopping me from being awesome right?
Most pro guitarists have an action which is slightly (often startlingly) higher than an amateur guitarist. They do this for tonal reasons. There’s less fret buzz, micro-warping of the neck due to temperature fluctuations in gigs matters less, and a host of other reasons. So if your guitar is not buzzing on the frets but just seems ever so slightly too high, try living with it?
I know, it sounds like a bad answer but there you are, it’s the truth.
Now onto the answer you wanted.
The Nut
We start at the nut. A lot of cheaper guitars just have a badly cut or positioned nut. If the strings are too high at the first fret you’re never going to get a good action and at worst the guitar will be hard work to play. The recommended gap between the strings and the first fret is about 24 thousandths of an inch, or about 0.1mm (at the low E) and 10 thou at the high E.
Get a strip of standard printer paper, hold down the low E string so it touches the highest fret (24? 22?) then slide the paper between the first fret and the low E string. it should go in without snagging.
Much more of a gap than that and you’ve probably got a bad nut. It either needs the slots cutting deeper, or the whole nut needs a bit shaved off the bottom to lower all the strings.
At this point I recommend that most people just take their guitar to a Luthier because what follows next is not pretty and depends on a thousand factors. What kind of guitar/nut system you have. Do you have a tremolo? a locking nut? Is the nut seated correctly? Do you need a completely new nut or can the slots just be filed down a bit? And so on.
You probably don’t have the right tools to cut the nut slots, and getting those tools is expensive. A single nut file can cost 20 quid, and you’ll need at least 6 of them. Then you’ll be tempted to use a nut file that’s just too big or too small, which will result in either tuning stabilisation issues, or the string moving sideways in the nut.
Seriously cutting your own nut is not as easy as you think it’s going to be. But if you absolutely MUST do this yourself then you can buy a thing called a ‘piercing saw’ or a ‘jewelers saw’ which has blades as thin as 1 thou. They are FAR cheaper than nut files, often you can get all the sizes you’ll need for just a few quid.
You need to cut the slots a thou or two bigger than the string itself, no more than that.
The Neck
After you’re sure that the action at the first fret is right, the next thing to look at is the neck itself.
Take the strings off (if you have a Floyd Rose, just take the trem springs off and remove the whole tremolo block, otherwise, start twisting those machine heads.
You’re going to need a straight edge, with little notches cut in it. You can make one of these yourself it’s not too hard.
Place the straight edge on the neck and check to ensure that the straight edge touches at the first fret, and the last fret, and that there’s a visible gap in the middle. That is, your neck should be slightly ‘U’ shaped. And I mean ‘slightly’. Generally, the thinner the strings you use, the more of a gap you’ll need. But you’re really only looking at a gap at the 12th fret, between the straight edge and the wood of the 12th fret, of again, about the thickness of a sheet of standard printer paper (0.1mm).
To adjust this you need to tighten or slacken the ‘truss rod’.
Adjusting the truss rod is again, not as simple as you think it’s going to be. There are many different types of truss rod these days. The best ones can be adjusted at the pickup end of the neck, standard ones are at the headstock end.
I’m not going to tell you exactly how to do this, but I am going to say a few things.
Firstly, your guitar must be in tune when you check the neck relief.
Secondly, ONLY MAKE VERY TINY ADJUSTMENTS AT ANY ONE TIME. That is, only twist the truss rod about 1/12th of a turn per adjustment, then check the neck relief with the straight edge, then try again etc.
Thirdly, if the bit you’re twisting seems to be really loose, or super hard to turn, stop what you’re doing, and take the guitar to a luthier.
I’m going to guess that about a thousand guitars a year are absolutely ruined forever by people badly adjusting their own truss rods.
The Bridge
So, your nut is cut correctly, and your guitar neck has the correct relief. Now finally we can adjust the bridge.
First If you have a tremolo DO NOT adjust the posts with the strings at full tension, or you will flatten the knife edges on the tremolo system, and it’ll have a flatspot that will RUIN your tuning stability.
Before adjust the saddle height, slacken off the strings. If it’s a tune-o-matic type bridge you should be ok to adjust the saddle height with the strings at tention.
Assuming the strings are too high, just start by lowering the bridge slightly (about a half turn downwards). Tune back up, and play the guitar up and down the neck looking for fret buzz. Don’t forget to try some string bends because often with very low actions you’ll get fret buzz during note bending.
Adjust the saddle height (preferably each string individually if your bridge allows it) until you start getting fret buzz, then back off (raise the bridge or saddles) a bit.
Now assuming that your guitar is healthy, you should have just about the lowest action you’re going to get.
Bad News
Action still too high, guitar not cheap, there’s some sort of problem right?
First, what are you expecting? Are you really expecting the action to be so low that you just have to blow on a string to fret a note? It’s not going to happen. So first check your expectations. Go and try someone else’s guitar and see what their action is like.
It’s just too high right?
Ok there are several possible problems.
-
Your frets need dressing.
It could be that your frets need filing. Sometimes you might a single fret that is too high. But most likely you have frets that have been dinged in the past, and are too low, causing fret buzz at the next fret.
You can dress your own frets, but I mean, you REALLY ARE straying into Luthier territory here. It’ll cost you about 80 quid to have a Luthier refret your guitar. It’s SOOOO worth the money, honestly.
There are a million youtube video’s on fret dressing. But essentially you use your straight edge to get the neck PERFECTLY FLAT, then you get a long straight edge with wet and dry sandpaper, and you file the frets longditudinally until they’re all the same height. Then you dress them back individually until they are all rounded again. Don’t do it. -
Your neck is warped transversally.
This is game over. If your guitar neck is warped in a strange way that the truss rod cannot adjust, your guitar is essentially ruined.
It’s very very rare, usually the result of the instrument being dropped, or stored at a strange angle in heat or cold etc.
A Luthier MAY be able to fix this by removing the frets, jigging up the guitar and reworking the fretboard, then refretting the guitar.
If the guitar is expensive, you might consider having this done, but usually it will cost more than the guitar is worth. - Your neck is just too damn flimsy.
You can’t get the action right because your neck is like a piece of spaghetti. Every time you think you’ve got it right, it seems to start buzzing a few days later for no reason. You take your guitar out of your warm house and go to a gig or a rehearsal and the neck just bands.
Sometimes there is a real underlying cause for this that’s fixable, usually to do with the truss rod. A luthier MAY be able to fix this. But sadly, a lot of older cheap guitars just have necks that are not up to the job. I might be shot for saying this, but cheaper Stratocasters are often in this category. The necks are just not rigid enough.
There’s a recent trend in guitar necks probably started by Guthrie Govan, which is to use toasted maple instead of standard maple for the neck wood. Toasted maple is far less sensitive to temperature, and you’ll get a much more satisfactory experience. But if your guitar is cheap, you’ll just have to live with a slightly higher action I’m afraid.
Strings
Finally let’s discuss the strings themselves.
For most of my life I’ve used 8’s. This is because my first guitars were very cheap, and the string tension was just too much. Also my guitars generally have floyd rose tremolo systems, and that can tend to increase the feeling of string tension.
But one of the problems with very thing strings is that they vibrate in a wider arc, meaning you need a higher action. It seems to be counter intuitive. You think that because the string is thin, you can lower your action a little, but the opposite is usually true.
If you’ve tried everything else, try changing the gauge of your strings.
This opens up a whole new can of worms. You might need a new nut cutting for starters.
But sometimes if you move up a couple of string gauges, you can counter intuitively lower the action, which counteracts the increase in string tension. It does mean you’ll have to do everything listed above, all over again though. Changing string gauge is once more, not as simple as you think it should be.
Pickups
All my guitars are HSS format. I just like the sound of a single coil pickup at the neck. And I MUST have a humbucker at the bridge.
The thing that guitarists do most is change the pickups in their guitars.
Magnetic Polarity
The first thing you should know about pickups is that they’re not all the same polarity magnetically speaking. Take the stratocaster, the bridge and neck pickup with be magnetically the same, but the middle pickup will be the opposite polarity (usually wound in the opposite direction). This is so that when you select both the bridge and the middle pickup together, they act ‘in phase’.
So many guitarists will buy (or be given usually) a single pickup and not bother to check if it’s the right polarity, they fit it and don’t really notice that it’s out of phase, they just notice that the guitar now seems to lack power.
A pickup is just a magnet wrapped in thin copper wire right?
Not really. Have you heard of ‘top going south’ or ‘top coming north’ pickups? You see what I mean?
What affects the nature of a pickup is really three things :
- The magnatic polarity direction of the pole pieces
- The direction of the copper winding, clockwise/anticlockwise
- The number of turns of wire vs the resistance of that wire
If you only buy ‘sets’ of pickups and to follow the manufacturers instructions for wiring them you should probably be ok.
All sets of Seymour Duncan pickups for example will usually come with a wiring diagram for different switch topologies (Strat blade, or les paul three way etc.).
But failing this, here are some tips.
First things first DO NOT STORE PICKUPS CLOSE TOGETHER, especially not magnetically stuck together. Pickup poles are permanent magnets, but they can loose their magnetism. In fact there is quick a common trick of altering the polarity of pickup pole pieces using neodymium magnets. I’ll speak about this a little later, but just know that if your pickup pole pieces become even slightly de-magnetised, it will affect their output.
In general guitar pickup COILS (not pickups because a humbucker is two coils) should alternate in polarity and winding direction. So starting with the coil closest to the bridge. It will be a particular polarity and winding direction, then next coil towards the neck will be the opposite, and so on.
A (weak) magnet should stick to the first coil (or repel), and not the second, stick to the third, and not the fourth. etc.
And the winding direction of each coil should alternate (top coming then top going then top coming etc.).
If this is not the case you will most likely have problems.
A quick note, yes people do deliberately wire pickups out of phase because they like the sound, but generally out of phase pickup coils when paired, will sound bad, and probably hum.
Checking the winding direction is a bit tricky. To determine wind direction you will have to remove the pickup and use a DVM. Look up on youtube how you determine winding direction.
Pickup Hotness
Hotness is a measure of how much ‘electricity’ is generated by a pickup when a string vibrates above it. ‘Hot’ pickups will have more windings, and will generally have a higher resistance when measured with a meter.
In general, good single coil pickups will have a resistance of around 7K and humbuckers around 11K, whilst the resistance of the winding is not a garaunteed measure of pickup output, it is usually pretty telling.
Low output pickups people tend to wind upwards towards the strings, which has the effect of damping the strings as they vibrate in such a strong magnetic field. High output pickups will tend to have stronger magnets, so they have a similar effect. What you want is a pickup that produces the right amount of output, but doesn’t dampen the vibration of your strings.
You can put a quite hot bridge pickup in because it won’t tend to damp the strings much, but then you have to match the output of that pickup at the neck where magnetic damping is a real factor. So choose wisely.
A thing to note is : If the reading of resistance of a pickup coil does not remain steady as you waggle the pickup in your hand, it may have a short in the coils. Another good way to check if the pickup is healthy is to check the resistance against the manufacturers quoted resistance. A deficit might mean the pickup is damaged.
Another way pickups loose output, as mentioned above, is by being demagnetised. You almost certainly don’t need to do this, but you can usually fix this using two neodymium magnets. Look this up on youtube.
In extreme cases, you can use this method to convert the magnetic polarity of a pickup. But don’t.
Floyd Rose Tremolo systems
First, a bit of a laugh..
Some people like Harley Davidson motorbikes. They look great, but the technology involved hasn’t changed for nearly a hundred years.
A 2018 Harley 1200cc V twin will put out about 60 horses. It will also leak from every gasket after a few years, and rattle your teeth.
In all honesty they are shit pieces of pig iron, but hey if that’s the aesthetic you like, each to their own.
There was a time in the 1960’s when the Japanese were copying companies like Harley Davidson and pretty much all motorbikes were the same. But now, Mr Yamaha is making the flat plane crank 1000cc YZF R1 which will put out about 180 horses, and it will do that reliably for years without a single drop of oil leaving the engine. The brakes on an R1 are six pot floating billet machined calipers. The R1 has upside down chemically treated forks in pure unobtanium yolks. The R1 has computer launch and traction control. It is modern, it is ‘better’ than a Harley in every conceivable way. There is absolutely no reason why anyone who really cared about motorcycles and motorcycle technology, would choose a Harley Davidson over a modern Japanese motorcycle. And yet they do, it absolutely staggers me.
Back in the 1960’s all guitars were the same, like all motorbikes were.
And then in 1976 a man named Floyd D Rose invented a new kind of guitar bridge and tremolo system that meant the guitar would never go out of tune. Since then guitar technology, like motorcycle technology has split into two. There’s the branch that is still doing things the old way. Making piss poor out of date technology and selling it to idiots.
And then there’s the other people.
Fat stainless steel frets, carbon fibre truss rods in toasted maple necks. Locking tuners on carefully angled headstocks, locking twin fulcrum tremolo systems with microtuners. High quality machine wound pickups with cross woven windings, copper sheet shielded compartments, CNC machined neck joints… And so on.
Or for the same money you can by an MIM Strat. Salty? Leave a comment.
The point is that the floyd rose no matter what you might think, represents ‘modern’ technology in a guitar. Even if you don’t use a tremolo system, it’s still more stable than any other bridge mechanism.
People say they suck tone. But those people.. also own Harley Davidson’s.
Here are a few tips for dealing with Floyd Roses, and choosing guitars that have them (because there are good, and not so good ones).
First, never get a tremolo system with a ‘collar’ type tremolo arm. They are garbage, insist on a screw in tremolo arm. One that has literally a screw thread cut onto the bottom of the tremolo arm itself. You are not Hank Marvin, the tremolo arm should not flop around like a teenagers arms. It should stay where you left it.
Make sure that the microtuners have enough travel to allow you to get a full 3 semitones of tuning travel. Some cheap floyds have really short screws and they’re garbage.