Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Fighting headless


This Q54 is perhaps one of my favourite guitars in terms of tone & playability. However, just days ago, I found it to be problematic. I kept making mistakes when playing notes on the D & G strings. So I re-looked at the following concerns:
  • Action settings. It's the same set up done on other guitars.
  • Bowed neck. Nope - straight as heck since Day 1.
  • No proper warm up. These days I commit to minimal warm up before playing; maybe 5min of finger exercises. I decided to do an extended warm up before playing this guitar but still...
  • Uneven frets. If there are any then the first thing that would manifest is fret buzzing but this was not the case. I did re-look at some frets at selected positions & did the rocking horse test; nothing was amiss. 
I almost gave up until I kept my fret rocker away (used for the rocking horse test) into a plastic holder which contain my radius gauge & that was when it hit me - the radius setting. True enough, the radius for this guitar was a little too flat. Someone did a 16" for this one back at the factory so the strings weren't conforming to the curved fret profile. I re-adjusted the radius to 14" & the playing was OK thereafter. I believe when we play a certain guitar, there's muscle memory adapting to certain neck / radius profiles. Once this is not met during play, it leads to mistakes or even discomfort. There's no harm re-looking at the set up just to make sure things should be the way they were meant to be - no compromise.

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