Acoustic Guitar Setup – How to Set up an Acoustic Guitar 🎸 | Guitar Lesson

hey I'm down car and today we're gonna talk about how to set up an acoustic guitar and we are talking with an expert here mr. Ben Armour BAM good to see you man good to see you though Ben is the Lee luthier at Sweetwater's guitar workshop Ben here we are your bench nice bench by the way thank you so when you get a guitar what is the first thing you do you know it needs a repair well the first thing any qualified like repair tech is gonna do is they have to inspect for physical damage present you know customers coming in off the street they might not have known that there was some damage to the guitars but specifically the bridge and the headstock area so the very first thing that any tech is gonna do is they're gonna look over the guitar and make sure that there's no physical damage before you go any farther so it's a visual inspection of the entire guitar a document and a physical damage that you see and then you know that you're safe to kind of go to that next step okay so the next step to me is always humidity so humidity and an acoustic guitar is it's it's what swells the top and shrinks the top so that's affecting your action it's affecting how a guitar sounds it's how a guitar plays so when things are cold your he is running your house is drying the action is gonna come down the wood is shrinking that's when we have cracks that's when the biggest complaints are my guitar buzzes now your your top is actually shrunk it's come down and your action came down with it so you'll also have sharp Fred ends you'll have cracks and the fret board cracks into the top so like that's the scariest is dry when things are really wet you can actually start to see braces pop out the side the top belly's up your actions really high in your guitar is muffled we're looking for about 45 percent we put a hygrometer in every guitar and we measure the guitar right right so okay so you check the humidity and then the next step is the next step is is to start looking at the guitar and I start up the nut end on the guitar so you're going to take the guitar you're gonna be looking at nut heights you're gonna site down the neck to look for a relief so is it back boat is it straight is there's the neck and relief yeah and then you're trying to start moving down the guitar you're gonna be looking at the bridge looking at the saddle you're really looking for is there anything wrong with that guitar like do I see anything out of place adjusting your nut height affects your height at your saddle also so we're gonna start here and make sure that's correct and then you start moving down so okay yeah so that's kind of the whole soup-to-nuts inspection part of it and we've got a guitar here we're gonna go through the checklist on it let's do okay [Music] okay so take us through it please all right well again like we said earlier we're going to start with the physical inspection of the guitar we're just gonna make sure that there is no damage that the customer didn't know about it that we were unaware about next thing we're doing we're gonna get this thing tuned up [Music] [Music] so already we heard a problem I don't know if you noticed it but one of the complaints that it's here for right we have an open buzz so we know that we have an issue this end of the guitar already now we're gonna take a look at the relief of the neck absolutely no relief in this guitar move up to the knot here we're going to give it the old tap test we're looking for a bounce at the first fret the numbers are really small it's about six thousands if you really want to get into it and a close number these are all pretty good now we're gonna move down actually gonna take some height measurements at the twelfth fret and all these numbers get recorded so that we know exactly where the guitar was when it came in and we know exactly where the guitar is when it left so if they're not happy where it was when it came in we know we don't want to be there with some new numbers so we're into we have no physical damage we noticed a problem here if they're not already so to really go any farther we the neck is back bowed we're gonna have to make a truss rod adjustment most like any nut basically righty-tighty lefty-loosey Reds a single-action truss rod and you know it's only working in one direction so we were going to loosen up this neck okay so you're loosening at this point yep so the necklace back bowed meaning that it was coming up this way right so relief is going down straight line is a straight line so we want it we want about six eight thousand really really we're trying to get to so I'm gonna back it off too far so that when you tighten the truss rod that's your final movement you never want your final movement to be going but loosening a truss rod because then the neck still has a chance to move so you always want to tighten the truss rod is your start from a loose fossa segment it's the same concept of when you put strings on right so you tune up to the note you don't tune down to a note so Ben I notice when you're adjusting the truss rod it's not moving very much what's your philosophy there yeah you really want to do about a quarter turn at a time mhm and really every adjustment that you do to the truss rod is also affecting your your being in tune anymore so you do a quarter adjustment and then really you should be going back and re tuning the guitar just to make sure that you are in perfect balance when you're done now we're going to take another look at that relief that is looking much better so now that you've set the relief is it check the final numbers is that the next yep it's time to see where all the numbers are at now that the neck has been properly set great we're going to measure at the nut we will record each and every nut measurement the low E is at twenty-seven thousand that is seven thousand more than I would like to see we are at 22 and 16 so we have a couple that are out of whack this is too high and that's good would be causing that intonation problem at the first fret so what we're gonna do is when are we gonna get the right gauged file and where you're going to address that right here and now put the string off to the side and we're gonna take a couple swipes with the file whatever doing work adjusting height you really want to go slow because you can't go back if I go too low we're talking about a new nut and new nuts are longer than a set up so i justed it it's really about 20 thousands plus or minus 4 thousands is about industry standard for nut Heights so what we're trying to do here is just get to a comfortable level we're at 25 I'm a thousandths away we're gonna take two more swipes and we're gonna have that set so when you're filing it's not just a simple file at the angle of the peghead it's a bit of a roll now you want to keep the front really nice and tight in the back you can kind of swoop it open that's called a splay angle and that's so the string goes through smoothly [Music] we are good so the other problem that we had was that g-string would the open so we're just gonna take a visual look and see what's going on the slot my height was good so I know that's not the problem they could be filed incorrectly could be too tight it could be chipped off in the front so really what I'm looking when I move the string is you're looking for really subtle things but you can see where the string is resting so when I look at that you can see that the front is chipped away so my height was a little bit too high so I have enough to work with so right now I just have to go grab the right engaged file and we have to reestablish the front as the leading edge it's there's a lot going on in here it looks easy but there's really a lot going on down here with how a guitar plays I'm already hearing the string going out clear still have a really good height or relief is set my nut height is set now I'm down to the twelfth fret to measure the action in plain position the neck goes into a little bit more relief gravity's involved the strings go away so if you can always put the guitar in playing position yeah and then we're gonna just visually take a look at the 12th fret it's really we're ready to take the strings off that's the next step now we can safely remove the saddle a saddle on an acoustic guitar properly fit when you flip it over it shouldn't fall out now if you had a pickup in the guitar you need it a little bit looser so but it is a pressure sensitive transducer there at Paizo so you need that really smooth fit when it's an acoustic it really should be a little more tighter you have this nice tool here now in my head I kind of had to remember how much we had to remove okay so we're gonna move over to the granite block what this tool is doing is making sure that the bottom of the saddle is completely flat we can just run it down they're always good to take some scotch brite or something else to the top of the saddle and what I'm looking for burs is it chipped you know this is the time when it's out to really take a look at those things take a look at the overall condition of the bridge does it need to be conditioned with actual oil in this case it looks in great condition the humidity is really good on this guitar nothing needs to be done to the bridge but it's when you take those strings off take the saddles off it's a great time to really take care of those problems that you can't ones the strings are on there so now we believe our action set will know want to get those strings on our relief has been set actions been set up to nut so now it's really it's kind of time for some cosmetic stuff I'm a guitar so you need time to get all the sweat and grime and gunk off the fret board the scotch brite is my preferred steel wool does great and we're just gonna come down what I always tell my guys is it almost try to polish that fretboard and then you'll take care of the frets so you pushing down pretty hard so I am a little crazy when it comes to fretboard oil and that I don't want to use too much too much oil will go down into your fret slots if you're really crazy about it you're gonna actually start to affect the glue bond between the fretboard and the neck inches okay it's used sparingly but when needed you can see that it brings back to like the black luster so also know they're really good time to take a look at your tuners simple Pat tests will let you know if there's something loose the post can always rattle a little bit but you're really looking for these they're a washer this is the back loose so I'm going to inspect the screws I'm gonna make sure everything's nice and tight these are great I think the final part of any setup is to make sure that the customer is happy with the product take care of that took care of that actually corrected neck relief the back where it's supposed to be and this guitar is ready to go for for another year nice work then nice work [Music] Ben thanks so much for doing this man we really appreciate it yeah thank you down for the play all right and thank you for watching hope you've enjoyed this hope you've learned something about how to set up an acoustic guitar if you have any questions you can start at Sweetwater calm [Music]

Channel: Sweetwater

Views: 302,190

Keywords: acoustic guitar setup, how to set up a guitar, how to set up an acoustic guitar, how to setup a guitar, guitar set up, setting up an acoustic guitar, setup acoustic guitar, how to set up acoustic guitar, acoustic guitar setup tutorial, how to set up guitar, how to setup acoustic guitar, setting up acoustic guitar, setting up a guitar, set up guitar, set up acoustic guitar, acoustic guitar maintenance, acoustic guitar action, how to setup your guitar, guitar setup

Id: fK4K7kgSrKc

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 27 2020