Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Talman bout


I was literally fighting this Talman last weekend for over two days. I think it's an episode worth sharing because I definitely do not wish for you to commit this oversight. 

So I started with unhappiness. This guitar manifested a high action when I started playing so play halted immediately. A quick sighting up the neck showed excessive relief & that got taken care of very quickly; truss rod adjustment. Nothing to it. That should pretty much solve the problem but no. Action was still high past the 15th fret so some shimming took place which addressed the action issue but resulted in fret buzz. This was restricted to the G, D & A strings. Re-shimming took place using a thinner piece of paper but buzzing persisted. I proceeded to check fret height but nothing was amiss. It's only the following day that the answer to my problem presented itself. I decided to check the guitar specs & found out that the radius for Talman models are 12" unlike the flatter 16" RG models. Darn! So there you go, a simple solution for a simple problem, really. Never assume, make efforts to check.


For the fun of it, I tried reverting to a 1.5mm pick which really isn't my kind of pick any more. Nothing good happened so a 3mm pick took care of proceedings. Hope you are having a good midweek. Take care. 👋

1 comment:

Ijau D. Koceng said...

I'm so accustomed with 12" radius - from Les Paul to Eclipse, even the compound radii Jackson/Charvel started with 12" on the bottom frets - so playing a flatter radius guitar (eg. friend's RG) feels so awkward these days