The degree of work required to make an instrument be what it can be is surprisingly, not always down to brand or price. While I have extensive experience with a vast range, I’ve only come across one guitar maker in the US who makes instruments I cannot improve upon, they are that good. There will be many more I am sure but I’ve yet to encounter them. Many of the famous and established marques produce what I deem unacceptable products for the price charged and many of these find their way to me post purchase from those I do work for.
Setup
The term “Setup” is one which I feel is somewhat ambiguous, some of the accounts of what is done or even charged for seems to sully the apparent meaning of the word. In my opinion, a setup deals with all the little flaws and details missed by mass production (and even some costly custom made items). In order to have a good action/string height, the fretting must be as close to uniform as possible taking into account the vagaries of certain timbers in different climates, in order to prevent buzzing. Few who do setups actually attend to this instead tweaking the truss rod or lowering the adjustable saddles on an electric guitar, I’ve even heard of folks who “walk on guitar necks with their bare feet” to manipulate them. Understanding wood, glue and the other components in the neck may shine a dismissive light on this as irrelevant. Assuming the fingerboard is not badly warped, reseating loose frets and trimming the tops off the higher ones is necessary using the correct tools, followed by recrowning and polish so that no evidence of the work, other than the shiny frets, is visible. Only once this has been done correctly can the saddles be lowered to lighten the action and improve intonation.
If you like a high action then your intonation will suffer, unavoidably, it’s basic trigonometry. If you like a low action but want to ‘attack’ the guitar hard with no buzzing, again, against the laws of physics. I recall reading an apparent quote in an interview with the late John Entwistle, the bassist with “The Who” amongst others, who instructed his repair man “I want it to buzz evenly on every fret up the neck”. This showed an understanding of the reality of playing a stringed instrument.
Action
While some feel you need to “dig in” to get the best, particularly from an acoustic guitar, this does not suit everyone or every guitar and often as we get older the strain of heavy strings or excessive string height can present problems with fatigue or in some cases things like Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). The bane of double bass players who ignore the warning signs is Carpel Tunnel Syndrome which can end playing altogether. For fretless bass guitar players who want the “Mwah”, an absolutely perfect playing surface (more difficult to achieve than a perfectly level set of frets) and a lower action than normal are essential although there are some players who can pick up any old instrument and sound almost as good on a cheap one as their own very costly item.
For those who are perfectly happy with what they have, leave it alone but those who feel they can’t get where they want or know something is not right, or it’s just not to their taste, go and see a proper repair man but make sure you know who they are or have seen work they’ve done which impressed you. Your instrument is often very precious and personal and your Luthier should reflect an understanding of that. My aim is largely to put a grin on peoples faces when I hand the complete job to them and most of the time that is the case but as a certain portion of what I do is interpretation, occasionally I get it wrong but then sometimes the owner doesn’t actually give me the relevant information so, know what it is that ails your guitar or describe the problem as best you can. If the answer or solution offered doesn’t ‘feel’ right then persist until you are satisfied, or walk away.
Intonation
Another problem for many players. The higher the string height the more inaccurate the strings intonation will be the farther you go up the neck. The original relationship between scale length and notes produces was discovered by Pythagoras and there is an exacting chain calculation to mark the fret positions using the divider of 17.817 but his measurement was based on a fixed and rigid metal bar. This gave us what we today use as fret intervals but once you add a string then you are into trigonometry or the maths of three sided shapes.
Were we using inflexible strings all with the same diameter and core size then the saddle would be straight across. Guitar strings in particular, come in a variety of sizes and styles. The fulcrum or ‘witness’ point on the saddle equates to the center or core of the string which is why on an electric with a plain G (3 wound plus 3 plain strings) the saddles are in a 3+3 “Z” pattern which is referred to as compensation. On a Jazz type guitar or acoustic with a wound third, that pattern is 4+2. Although Classical/nylon strung guitars rarely have any intonation compensation set on the saddle, many will benefit from having it added post purchase but the strings for these particular guitars can be notoriously unreliable when it comes to tuning and in my experience, all too often it’s the more costly brands that are the worst offenders.
Bass players who are incorrectly intonated can and will cause undue aggravation amongst their colleagues and while I have met many who don’t care as they don’t value the bass’s position and sometimes the one that they were ‘relegated’ to playing, most bassists are tone and tune aware. However, it has been my experience that guitar players who don’t break strings can often have them on the instrument until they are worn out and the intonation has ‘gone’. When asked to check tuning, many will go for the open string option using a tuner of some sort. This will confirm the open strings are indeed in tune but, they need to be checked again at the 10th fret and higher positions. This can often paint a different response. The nett effect though is that it appears, in this particular situation that the bass, Clarinet, Tenor Sax or other lower range instruments, are apparently out of tune.
Dealing with the “Room acoustic” issues in different venues is rarely a problem for higher octave instruments and controlling those rogue bass frequencies can be a challenge on the double bass in particular. I’ve done many gigs on the big fella where I was having to damp the three strings I wasn’t playing and fight the one I was because of feedback of some description.
Equal Tempered tuning and nuts in general
This is an interesting development which is getting more popular. Some players are very sensitive to intonation variations and although a correctly compensated bridge will be very close to correct it is not actually possible to be fully in tune on a guitar with conventional strings, maybe one day but not now. For most this is ok but for those whose ears suffer the indignity of a note falling somewhere between 438 and 442Hz and can identify it, many cannot or are not affected by it, there is some relief available.
You may have come across electronic tuners for sale that state “Chromatic and Buzz Feiten tuning compatible”, that’s what this is about because a stock chromatic tuner may have difficulty identifying fretted notes where a compensated nut is fitted. Technically, the notes are incorrect but they sound properly adjusted to our human ears, a cat might say otherwise. Tweaking the mid range boost on a guitar amp has the most dramatic effect of all the controls because that’s the range we hear in most strongly. Likewise, our perception of intonation is not necessarily in line with the actual note.
Diligent fretless players often struggle with this for most of their careers and even those who seem to have it down may at some time confess as to how hard they practice. Guys like Percy Jones of Brand X who could wield a 6 string fretless, do the vocals and amazing solos or intricate bass lines without looking, as well as Jaco, Steve Bailey, Alain Caron, Marg Egan and Pino Palladino to name a few, may have been able to do this or certainly gave that impression. However, if you have a ‘serious’ bassist in your band and things are out of tune, your bass player may be your salvation and help sort it out, if you choose to listen.
I came across this tuning system as a modification to guitars a good while ago and initially found it hard to rationalise however, in the last couple of years I’ve custom made and fitted more than a dozen of these. They are available to purchase in various places but along with nuts and saddles, I find the only way to do it properly is to make each one for each guitar. It is not possible to purchase an off the shelf nut or saddle that will install correctly on the instrument and work properly. Perhaps if one is obtaining a specific OEM part say for a Taylor model, from the Taylor factory, it should fit ok but the relative string heights in the slots will not likely be satisfactory. As such an item is probably expensive to start with and perhaps it might seem daft to buy it and then take it to a Luthier to do the final adjustment, or maybe not.
There are some pics in the gallery of one of these I made for a Laurent Brondel acoustic for session supremo Tony Byrne who has a sensitive ear. I made one for his old D35 which came in for extensive work and the result was the Brondel coming in for the same treatment afterwards. Because of the higher action acoustics have I have fitted more of them than to electrics. Anyone who is afflicted with perfect pitch may find a compensated nut helpful and while I jokingly say afflicted, to be in a large orchestra or conducting it, and have perfect pitch must be torture because no matter how in tune they all are at the beginning, as everything warms up, little by little out they go.
Truss rods, strings and neck relief
This is a particular type of Voodoo for many stringed instrument owners. The belief that they can destroy the neck by incorrect adjustment is folly unless one is swinging out of the adjusting wrench. For most purposes one cannot correctly lower action by tightening the truss rod although in straightening the neck relief, technically, that is what happens. For the string to vibrate freely a certain amount of relief or curvature of the neck is required. Depending on the instrument, how it’s to be played and the gauge/pitch of the strings dictates the amount required. As acoustic guitars have heavier strings and are usually played harder, more relief is required than might be needed on a solid bodied electric.
Acoustic strings are mechanical in nature and their job is to vibrate the top of the guitar. Electric strings on the other hand are designed to “excite” a field given off by the magnetic pickups, piezos are a whole other thing and I’ll talk about those later. If one is to put a bronze wound string on an electric, the output will be very weak compared to to the other nickel or stainless wound strings. Some folks have tried this for drop tuning but as a 54+ nickel wasn’t available, a bronze was substituted with inevitable results. Likewise, fitting a set of electric nickel wounds on an acoustic will work but they won’t have the same effect on the top as acoustics of the same gauge and will lack colour. Once plugged in this is not an issue as acoustic guitars are almost always equipped with piezo based sensors if a pickup is fitted. Piezo, Greek for pressure, doesn’t care what the material is, if it’s vibrating the crystals will send that signal to the buffer. There will be a tonal difference from the amplifier between the nickel and bronze strings however.
Once the fretting is uniform and correct, truss rods can be tightened to produce a different playing surface but the range of adjustment is quite small and unless one understands what one is actually doing when turning the key, either get instruction from someone who knows what they are talking about or don’t experiment. Too many music shop employees tweak truss rods to make the action seem lower and thus the guitar more playable and sellable.
You won’t likely damage anything by a gentle turn here and there but you might induce buzzing or make the action uncomfortable to play. Some guitars and basses, particularly those that are well setup and have a low action may require the owner to learn truss rod manipulation because unless the neck is carbon fibre or heavily graphite reinforced, seasonal, heat and humidity changes can cause the neck to move around. On an instrument with higher action this will likely not be noticed but on a finely tuned one it will and if your luthier has done a good job, they should tell you about this and explain what is happening when the neck moves and how to deal with. My personal acoustic bass guitars have very slim necks, both of them have graphite reinforcing under the fingerboard but they still move around a bit and often require a little tweak before a session or gig but I am ultra critical and fussy, about my instruments, as well as the ones I work on.
It’s not brain surgery but you do need to have it explained. Some folks won’t even contemplate doing this and are perfectly happy to pay someone to do it for them, just make sure it’s the right person.
More to come….
Tony Thompson Guitars 