Why a Guitar Setup?

Many knowledgeable guitar players bring their brand-new guitars to our shop to be set up before even playing the guitar. Others turn to YouTube or websites for info on how to do their own guitar setups. Are these people wasting time or money? What do they hope to achieve? After all, what’s better than a brand-new guitar right out of the box?

The truth is that most of the time, those brand-new guitars are a bit of a mess! It takes my experienced, professional guitar techs an average of one hour and often longer, to properly get a new guitar set-up to tip-top playable condition!

What problems do we typically find during setups?

Guitar Setups: Neck Relief

Neck relief is one of the most common issues. Sometimes the truss rod is totally loose and causing a bit of a rattle inside the neck. In these cases, the relief is usually too great which can cause intonation problems, buzzing and comfort issues.

On other guitar setups, we’ll find the truss rod over-tightened and zero neck relief. This usually results in a back bow and lots of fret buzz.

Why do you need neck relief? Guitar strings vibrate more in their center than at the ends (nut and saddle). Most people prefer rather low string action, so to prevent the strings striking frets in the center of the fretboard, there needs to be just a bit more room (relief) around the eighth fret or so.

Fretboards with tighter radius will require a bit more neck relief than flatter fretboards. Most string action gauges are not accurate enough (action gauges vary in accuracy plus or minus 15 thousandths of an inch and neck relief is generally set between 8 and 12 thousandths!), so professional guitar techs use special tools for neck relief measurements.

Guitar Setups: Nut Slots

Nuts with sharp edges and wrong angles

Nearly every single new guitar, whether you spent $100 or $3,000, has improperly cut nut slots! They tend to be cut at ninety degrees to the height of the nut and have a sharp edge for strings to bind on. You know how sometimes you turn a tuner key and nothing seems to happen; you turn it again and nothing; you turn once more and ZING now your sharp and have to de-tune and start over?

That’s an improperly cut nut. And because correct knowledge of guitar teching is rather rare, companies act like this is the way things are supposed to be, so they sell grease with fancy names to help lessen the friction.

The correct way to cut the slots is on the same angle that strings follow as they leave the nut for the tuner posts. Then, using a nut file, you round the back bottom of the nut edge and, for D and G strings, you also should slightly widen and round the edge toward the strings’ respective tuner post. Done properly, no grease is needed.

Nuts with high and/or low slots

Another common problem we find is nut slots that are either too high, causing sharp notes and poor intonation, or too low, causing loss of tone and sustain or even fret buzz. Sometimes the nut shelf is cut at the wrong angle and one side has high or low slots and the other side has the opposite!

There are YouTubes, websites and forums telling how to do guitar setups that show using a variety of tools to file nut slots, from welding tip cleaners to butchering feeler gauges. But they don’t do a proper job. Unfortunately, only an expensive set of nut files can let you properly file nut slots.

Guitar Setups: Uneven Frets

I’d be rich if I could bet people with brand-new guitars, that they have uneven frets or high fret ends! Especially if they spent $300 or more dollars on the guitar! The odds are about 66% in my favor!

Those high frets or high fret ends can be anywhere on the guitar but when doing guitar setups, we find most high frets between the twelfth fret and the highest fret.

If your tech even bothers to look for high frets (most don’t!) they’re likely to file the offending frets down. That’s a huge mistake! Most high frets and high fret ends are caused by loose frets. Tapping them down with a plastic mallet will generally re-seat them. Sometimes the factory has cut the fret tang back too far and we need to glue the fret end down or even replace the fret.

If a tech files a loose fret down, it will now be too low when playing that fret, which makes the next fret relatively high and causes buzzing.

Guitar Setups: What Are They?

Unfortunately, there is no standard defining a “guitar setup”, though we are trying to correct that through Guitars Done Right. It’s our belief that a proper guitar setup should cover every aspect of the guitar that affects the player’s experience, other than the style of the guitar itself.

There is no standard of what operations should be done. No standard on what order they should be done in. There is no standard on what measurements are optimal or even whether measurements should be taken at all!

Interesting Note: Most (so-called) guitar techs don’t measure at all! Nothing! Not nut slot heights, not neck relief, not string/saddle heights. They replace measuring with “noodling”!

Another interesting note – Most guitar techs do guitar setups in the wrong order when ends up undoing their previous work! I have to include most guitar manufacturers in this list! That’s right, many major guitar manufacturers teach their techs to do guitar setups in an order which ends up undoing their previous work!

Notice that “Action” means setting string heights by adjusting the saddle which sits at one end of the guitar strings. However much you alter the height of the saddles, you’ll change the string heights by half that amount at the 12th fret. Letl’s say we lower saddles by twenty thousandths to get an optimal string height of say sixty-five thousandths at the 12th fret.

That means we’ve just set the action as low as possible without buzzing. Using the above T.R.A.I.N. sequence, and 90% of guitar techs on a popular international guitar tech forum stated that this is the sequence they go by, as well as many guitar manufacturers, we’ll set intonation next and then…finally, we’ll make any necessary nut adjustments.

Remember when I said that whatever change we make to one end of the string, we make 50% of that change at the 12th fret? Well, the nut also represents one end of your strings. If we have to raise or lower any nut slots by, say twenty-thousandths of an inch, we just changed the action as measured at the 12th fret by ten-thousandths!

If we had strings as low as they could go without buzzing, then we lower some or all of the nut slots, we are now buzzing! If we raise all or some of the nut slots, our action is now ten-thousandths higher than what we felt was optimal.

Oh, and your intonation? Well, thankfully a few thousandths up or down at either end of the strings shouldn’t change their length enough to cause intonation issues. But that’s the only bit of “good news” about the T.R.A.I.N. guitar setup system!

Now you might say, well we usually only have to file a ten thousandths or so, from the nut slots. “Usually”, but even that makes a five-thousandths difference. Since – if you’re measuring – nut slot heights are checked while fretting at the highest fret, thus taking saddles out of the equation, why not just take care of them after setting neck relief? That’s what a “real” guitar tech would do!

Guitar Setups: There’s More!

There’s a lot more to guitar setups than I’ve covered here, but my laptop is about to run out of pixels, so I’ll wrap things up. After getting your guitar a good, professional setup, if you’ve learned how to properly adjust your truss rod, you should check your neck relief a couple times a year. Why?

Your strings and truss rod are locked in a perpetual “tug-of-war”. Strings try to pull the headstock up and bow the neck while your truss rod pulls the other way trying to keep the neck straight.

Here’s the thing – everything fatigues! (Including <yawn> this writer!) When your strings fatigue, they go a bit flat but you quickly re-tune them. That’s like bringing fresh players onto the strings’ tug-of-war team.

But what about that poor truss rod? Who’s re-tuning it? If you let it go too long, your guitar’s neck begins to bow ever greater and now your strings have not just close to 100 pounds of tension, they now gain leverage also. Before long, your guitar neck could be permanently damaged.

Guitar setups are important and, other than being able to adjust your truss rod, your guitar will appreciate getting checked over by a professional every year or two!

If you want the best possible, professional guitar setup for your guitar, come to Hank’s Guitar Shop!