Thursday, April 8, 2010

Guitar set up: Simple instructions (maybe) Part 2

You will then proceed to tune your guitar. This way, your set-up & anomaly assessments are based on the instrument in standard tuning. Remove the truss rod cover.

Employ your capo on the first fret while fretting the instrument at its final, uppermost fret. Now observe the gap between the string & the fret crown at the 12th, 8th & 7th frets by pressing the strings down lightly at those areas. Do this for all strings. The objective here is to check the neck's straightness. If the gap between the strings & the fret crown is too much, it means your neck's relief (how concave, the shape of your neck is) is correspondingly too much. If your strings come into contact with all the frets when you are doing this, it means you have a straight guitar neck, which is the best condition to be working with. Remember, a very straight neck is not the most appealing.

...to be continued.
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Startled from sleep.

2 comments:

Ijau D. Koceng said...

does this technique applicable with basses too?

subversion.sg said...

definitely :-) luthiers use this method as a sure way to determine neck straightness as opposed to visual sighting.