Friday, April 9, 2010

Guitar set up: Simple instructions (maybe) Part 3

If your neck's relief is rather excessive (giving rise to a bowl-shaped neck instead of being straight), you need to turn your truss rod clockwise upon facing it i.e. when you look at the nut from the headstock end. How much to turn? The recommendation here is for you to exercise a quarter turn. However, since my neck isn't too adversely warped, I did a 45-degree turn only.

Let the neck breathe for a little while (say after a song's worth of wait) before you check further. The understanding here is that the neck has been straightened, therefore, the standard tuning would have gone sharp. Plug in your tuner to check this out; as evident above, my KORG Pitch Black registered just that. If no such reaction is registered, it means the truss rod adjustment was not effective. Repeat the instructions in Parts 2 & 3 until your neck is straightened or made less concave to your liking.

In my case, I needed to tweak the truss rod a little bit more to achieve a flatter profile. My observation here is (after many personal set-ups), guitar necks with a bigger radius value perform better with a flatter neck profile.

CAUTION
After 2 or 3 attempts, should you find no reactions to your adjustments, please STOP the tampering & leave it to the pros to diagnose the problem.

...to be continued.

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