How to set up your guitar perfectly

so in this video I'm going to be covering setups and also some basic electronic troubleshooting when I get guitars sent to me majority of the time when they say they need to have a setup or something along those lines done it's usually maintenance consider it like a tune-up for a guitar that every another guitar put a tune-up for a car and every now and then it needs to be cleaned every now and then things and you better be adjusted sometimes you have a high fret or two sometimes you have to do a nut adjustment things like that but every now and then someone will also send a guitar in and they'll say I'm having problems with one of the pickups or I'm having a problem with one of the potentiometers it cracks it makes cracking noises or static sometimes people say I think my neck has worked or the string keeps falling off the side when I try fretting it so in this video I'm gonna try to cover all that I'm going to be doing a setup on this particular guitar this is a set neck I'm also going to be doing one on a vendor Stratocaster no it's going to be a squire but there it's all the same thing okay and I'm also going to be going over a Floyd Rose bridge because people have a problem with trim systems for some reason now first things first let's say they don't tell you what string gauge they prefer you have to figure it out now they'll usually tell you but what you can do is get a set of calipers set it on millimeter okay come over here and just clamp the high E and then as soon as you clamp the high E it'll show up right there now I measured this before and it's actually tens it could be an 11 but this is this is actually quite smooth and if you go really really tight on it you can even get a nine and a half so figure tints you can also come over here to the LOI do the exact same thing and we're getting about a 45 and a half so it's 46 okay so a set of tins sabatons will be just fine on this particular guitar and looking at this I can tell these strings have not been changed in a long time so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take these strings off now this particular guitar he was not getting fret bus he didn't say that there was fret buzz to it so I'm assuming everything is fine with that but I'm also going to check the frets for level anyway just to make sure so I can lower the action as much as possible so we've come to this point right here and we have to ask ourselves is it time to clean the fretboard any time somebody sends me a guitar I always clean the fret board typically I use naphtha okay and if you don't have access to naphtha that's fine you can use a Zippo lighter fluid now some people will ask if you can use things like pledge and things like that I don't recommend it okay now naphtha does not damage any type of finishes so you don't have if it's lacquer you don't have to worry about it if it's urethane you don't have to worry about it it also evaporates quickly and it doesn't leave a residue okay and I'm just gonna go through this and kind of scrub gently on this trying to remove any growing now let's say for instance there's a lot of grime on here what would be a way that you could actually remove a lot of grime and you could use a razor so you can get a razor if you see a lot of grime and come in right next to the thread and gently move back and forth scraping away they're running now you can do that and that'll work generally I don't need a razor nothing unless it has never really been clean in a really really long time typically you don't have to use something like that to scrape off a lot of the gunk so what I'm doing is I'm just I'm just going back and forth trying to get rid of any type of dead skin cells oil things like that trying to get it off of the fret board there'll be some people that will do it when they're doing sit ups they'll have a call or something underneath here to hold the guitar up generally have identify don't see the reason for that but if it makes you feel a little bit more comfortable you can always just roll up a towel and stick a towel up underneath here to gently hold it so that way the weight of the guitar is not on the headstock okay but I'm not pushing down on this everything I'm gonna be doing is very gentle so we're good to go sometimes you have to do a little bit of scrubbing some people will use a toothbrush now you can use a toothbrush but generally I don't I think just a regular rag does just fine and it also is a little bit more delicate so you reduce the chances of leaving any scratches in the fretboard wear a toothbrush on the other hand depending if it's a hard bristle brush or if it's real cheap you can end up you know putting some scratches in it a lot of people will ask when you oil a fretboard what should use some people will ask can you use olive oil can you use you know three in one oil what you want to use is any type of oil that you would ordinarily use for woodworking okay and in this case I'm going to be using Howard feedin wax this is my favorite fretboard oil it's got beeswax in it as well as certain oils and it cleans as well as it re hydrates in a way even though it's not hydrating because that's water but what it does is it ends up putting the oils back in that had been lost over time don't get fancy with different types of oils just use you know use anything that you would ordinarily use on wood but don't use things like olive oil and stuff like that okay some people will say can you clean a fretboard with water and a toothbrush you can and you can probably get away with it but I don't recommend doing it okay it's usually better to use things that are not going to absorb inside the fretboard that can cause it to expand from absorption or end up causing it fret to pop out or something along those lines a lot of times you can get away with it nothing will happen but generally I think it's a bad idea I'll usually use some type of product like naphtha or something along those lines to clean everything after this is sent for a moment okay I go through with the rag again and I try to clean up all of the oil that I had applied now what this does is it rehydrates and I keep using the word hydrate when I really shouldn't because hydrate basically means water but what it what what it does is it puts the oils back that had been lost over time because the oils within wood will dissipate over a given period of time now if you have something like maple or something usually those have been coated with some type of lacquer and if that's the case you don't really have to worry about putting any oil or anything on if it is a unfinished maple fretboard you can use something like butcher block oil but you don't want to put a lot and you know oil can be just as bad as water if you put too much people have a tendency to over oil they're fretboards too often the only time that you need to do this is when you do a thorough cleaning which is maybe once a year maybe once every two years okay so now that I've got all of this cleaned up you know and I'm double checking the rag I'm saying when I get rip right next to these frets I'm seeing if I see any like dirt or anything show up because if I do that means I need to continue cleaning but we're pretty good what I'm feeling in these areas is actually super glue or something that they used to embed to attach the frets to the fretboard so that is that and that's all you have to do to clean a fretboard people a lot of people they they overthink it they try to get too creative when cleaning a fretboard and you don't need to do that I also will generally come in here and also kind of clean all the dust and everything off of the pickups and everything up in this area too while I have everything off okay now before I reattached the strings on this I have to check the pickup now he was saying that the pickup kind of goes in and out and sometimes the pot makes funny noises so we're gonna go ahead and take a look at this we're going to take off the cavity cover on the rear here so we can see if there's anything that jumps out at us that doesn't look right okay visual inspection is important now this particular screw that I'm taking out right here it was loose okay I'm gonna show you how you can go ahead and make that tight again this will and it will also work on necks and neck pockets okay so what I'm doing right here is I'm looking for anything that is visually wrong okay now what could be visually wrong of wire touching another wire for instance or like this black wire right here being kind of long and maybe touching another portion of that switch you know I'm looking for anything that could be a problem I'm looking at these wires right here seeing if they're touching something that they're not supposed to be touching I'm looking for loose connections I'm looking for anything that just doesn't seem quite right and I'm also going to be looking at the pickup a little bit later and I'm also going to be looking at the input jack or the output jack for that matter to see if there's something there that might be causing this now let's say for instance let's say I don't see anything well there could be a problem with just debris and dust and things like that getting within the potentiometer so what you can get is some simple cleaner and lubricant this is for electronic contact cleaner okay and I'm going to come inside here where the pot is where that opening is right there and I'm gonna spray this and I'm going to turn this handle on the pot a few times going both ways that should take care of that and I'm also going to be doing the exact same thing here you can sometimes also spray in like little sections like that depending on who makes the potentiometer now that I've done that I'm going to do the same thing to the switch okay and then from here I'm gonna move this back and forth now this cleans it and it lubricates it okay now from here once again I'm double-checking everything I want to make sure that there's no wires that are broken I want to make sure that there's no wires that have accidentally been snipped from when somebody was trying to strip the insulation because that happens sometimes you'll see right here in areas like this a lot of times you'll see it's cut and you'll have intermittent sound coming in and out so you want to check things like that you want to look for breaks you want to look for bad solder joints you want to look for anything everything that I saw in here seems fine so now what we're going to do is since that looks okay we're gonna get into the pickup here we're gonna pop this off and we're gonna look at the pickup to see if there is any wires or breaks or anything along any types of shorting out because generally that's going to be the problem with a pickup something is shorting out so we'll take these also this is also a good time to look at the pickup rings to see if somebody had installed them upside down like backwards in other words it would be like this instead of like this okay kind of pull this a little bit right in this area right here you'll see some wires that have been put together inside there maybe not so well but there's a couple that had been tied together and if it's not there it's going to be over here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to loosen these screws a little bit okay and I need to get this tape off and the only way that I'm gonna be able to do that is to take these screws out completely so now that I've got nut I've got this loosened I want to I want to look around this and I want to find where the tape ends which is right here and very carefully I want to remove this tape and the reason why you want to remove it very care bully is because this is a directly attached to the coil okay now this has been whack spotted okay now see this right here has me concerned how this is kind of loose right there and I can see wires that could be the potential problem so I want to gently remove this if it if it is coming off if it doesn't really want to come off unless like you you do a lot of pulling what you can do is take a hairdryer to it and it'll loosen up any tape residue or wax that might be potentially holding this stuff together okay okay so now that we've got the tape off where you're going to find the problem is going to be in areas like this where they they tie this coil to this coil and sometimes they'll put glue and things inside there to kind of keep it in place but I need to I need to get access to that so that way I can verify that there's no breaks or it's a bad connection anytime that you're working on a pickup you have to be very careful that you do not damage any of the coils inside a lot of times when they end up putting when they end up taping these off sometimes the tape comes undone and or it doesn't get taped well and then it touches the body it touches the pickup plate and when that ends up happening is it grounds out so you might lose one of the coils or you might lose both coils and then if it's something that's ever so slightly there you'll have an intermittent pickup as well or you're going to get you're going to even get static and get all sorts of nasty things so what I want to do is I want to take a look at these and I want to make sure that these have been taped off well and nothing is touching one another okay what your this white stuff you see is the wax there's no reason to wax pot this again after you do this so these look these look to be taped okay but I have to make sure that they've been soldered together well and they're not they're not breaking apart and the only way to do that is to remove the tape that's on here and verify just like that okay I can tell that that soldered well okay and while I am doing this I'm also noticing that the pickup has its position pieces the the adjustable pieces down here generally these or toward the neck and this is toward the bridge okay so I might flip this because that will help a little bit when it comes to really trying to dial in the sound and it's not as important when you're just going humbucker humbucker but if you have a coil tap that I shouldn't say coil tap but if you have a coil splint it can make a difference so it's usually a good idea to keep this that way and then this this way but another way to make sure that he didn't flip the magnets or something in there I don't want to assume anything I'm gonna put my compass here so this is the north side because it's pointing south and I'm going to come over here and I am getting the south side so I has not changed the pickups at all the magnet so I could leave it like this flip the magnet and then it would be okay or I I can get this and flip the pickup depending on how much wire he left in there I might not be able to so I'll see about that here in a minute but now that I've got those off and I could tell everything has been soldered well I know that the problem isn't there there is the potential of the problem being where this lead wire is going back into the coil but if I were to start digging into that I might damage the coil so it's better to assume that that is not the problem and figure it was just a sticky potentiometer it was just a bad dirty pot okay and you want to make sure that these get taped very well so they cannot touch each other okay just like that now at different luthier supply companies you can get pickup tape okay tape that is made for pickups and it's basically electrical tape but it comes in different widths as well as usually the one that goes around the outside is like fabric that has been impregnated and I want to when I put this back I don't want it to really look like I ever took it apart now if we saw that one of these wires was loose or something like that we would Reece odder it okay but I didn't see anything like that everything looks okay ordinarily I wouldn't take a pick up like this apart because it's a rare it's a rare occurrence but I told them I would take it apart just to verify to make sure that everything within the pickup itself is kosher so now that I have that this is the pickup tape that I'm going to be putting around the outside of it and you can tell that it's kind of it's fabric so I'm going to take these and once again just kind of push them over to one side like this I'm going to start here grab and pull to kind of make these flat again and wrap this around the outside so now that that has been put back together I can go ahead and reattach the pickup ring and keep in mind that the pickup rings when you see them like this high side goes to bridge low sight starts going to neck and that's all we and that's even the case here on the neck okay I can't tell you how many times I've seen somebody that had installed them the other way and it can modify the way that the pickup sounds not dramatically but it puts the pickup at a strange angle to the strings now as soon as I get this started and lift it up a little bit I'm going to be putting the screws back in now there's one more thing to consider when doing this and that is looking at the wires that you cannot see the ones that go through the cavities every now and then you'll see that somebody won't have extended the wire and put an electrical tape on it and all this other stuff and the electrical electrical tape becomes loose and the next thing you know you have things grounding out so once again visual inspection now so far this is pretty straightforward this that this guitar I'm going a little bit above and beyond what I would ordinarily do but for the sake of trying to show you how a lot of this stuff should be done that's why I'm doing it might as well clean this while I have the opportunity and I'm only going to bring this up a little bit because we're gonna adjust these pickups in just a little while once we put the strings back on this I'm going to get and I'm going to flip it if I can it depends on how much wire is left sometimes people cut the wire way too short so it doesn't give you any room for adjustments okay so it does give me room to do that but I have to flip the pickup ring as well and also looking at these pickups it doesn't look like anybody has a adjusted the poll pieces and adjusting the poll pieces can make a dramatic difference in the way your guitar sounds so we're going to be doing that too and I'll show you how to do that where everything sounds like it's supposed to so now that I've got that in once again the the taller part toward the bridge so we're getting real close to being able to put some strings on but before I can put some strings on I'm going to double check that the frets are okay now usually I will put this in the neck jig in order to do that but I'm going to show you you don't have to have a neck jig to you know check to see if your your frets are perfectly level just make sure that you have access to the truss rod and you will need a very accurate straightedge so what I'm going to do it is I'm gonna take my very accurate straight edge here and I'm gonna lay it right down the center of these frets and I what I'm doing is I'm looking at the top of every fret and I'm trying to see if I see light between the straight edge and the top of the fret if I see like that means that fret is low okay I'm also seeing if I can get this thing to rock now this without any truss rod adjustments is very straight okay it's very straight but there's one thing that I notice and these two right here are not touching the straightedge so this has a very slight back bow right here now because of its location if it was any worse deep after I end up putting the strings on and there's tension on it it might bring that forward and make everything perfectly flat but if it was any worse it could create a problem with open open strings having and because what ends up happening is that stream comes down this way and it kind of shoots down right and so if the nut height is not perfectly correct what happens is when you hit that open string it hits these two guys okay get some buzz and as soon as you fret here you're bypassing that back bow and as soon as you do that then all of a sudden the fret post goes away but it's ever so slight it's not even the thickness of a business card and I think when I put tension on here from the strings it'll take that that bow out and he never complained about fret buzz so I'm assuming that everything is okay with that but I did want to check these now if they were severely out okay what is severely out if maybe this section you could put a business card this section is touching this section maybe a business card this section maybe a business card in other words we have a roller coaster we would have to level the frets okay because if not we wouldn't be able to get really low action and that's what he wants is really low action if if we were getting a rock what we would do is we would adjust a truss rod until we can make this as flat as we possibly could but the way that the truss rod is currently adjusted that thing said nearly perfectly flat there were a couple of spots that it probably wouldn't hurt to do fine-tuning on the frets but when I start doing fret work it it goes into the realm of more work that's outside of the realm of just a setup so if you do want to know how to do fret work and how to make everything perfectly level in my guitar building course I go over that on building necks and fret work and it has everything that you would need to know as far as making sure that everything on your neck is absolutely perfect before you start putting in strings and everything back on but this is in good condition and so there's no there's enough I really need to do on this if I wanted to just to kind of make things look a little bit nicer I could take this to the buffer and just buff everything up real nice and then clean it again and it will look fantastic in fact I'm probably going to do that because some of these frets look a little dull it only takes me a minute to do it but to the customer they're like wow look at what he did to my neck it looks fantastic so it's the little things that make a difference now before I start getting ready to put strings and stuff back on I want to clean this a little bit and I am going to take the fretboard to the buffer but the reason why I want this all the dust and everything off and I want everything to look nice and clean it's because it means a lot to the customer when the guitar shows up and and it looks nicer and cleaner than it did when it left you know their possession it means a lot it's just like if you go and you have tires put on your car and the people they're clean your rims - they don't put just a tire to clean your rims you you're you're like wow that's really nice that's cool yeah you know and that's pretty much the same thing when it comes back I want him to look at it and go wow there was a lot of work done on this and it's usually only a minute or two of work so right now I'm going to go ahead and buff this out on the buffer and then I'm gonna clean it again because it will leave a residue from the buffing and then we can start putting the strings back on and from there we'll see if we have to do a truss rod adjustment we'll see if we have to set the intonation any well we'll see if we have to adjust the action and after everything is said and done we will also check the electronics to make sure that we're not getting any strange noises if we are getting strange noises from the potentiometer still then we're going to have to replace it so now that this has been buffed and it looks nice and shiny I have to get that residue off if not it's going to end up leaving a it's going to end up making the person's fingers black when they try playing it so right now I'm using naphtha buffing will also end up removing a lot of that debris that oil and dead skin cells and stuff the buffing will also get rid of that so if you're having a hard time cleaning the fretboard you can always take it to the buffer and you want to keep cleaning this until you no longer see any black show up on your rag okay so that's been cleaned up and now we can go ahead and start talking about putting the strings back on and there's one thing that you notice I didn't do before I started working on this guitar and that was I did not check every single fret to see if there was any buzz okay and the main reason why I did not do that is because that was never a problem with this customer okay cuz he said that every there he has no fret buzz everything's great so there so there was really no reason for me to do that after I'm done putting the strings on I am going to go through and I'm gonna check to see and make sure that there is no fret buzz okay but I generally will do that with a new set of strings I'll generally do that before I send any guitar out now if somebody had said hey I have a lot of fret buzz that would be the very first thing I would have checked right I would go up and play every string every note up and down the fretboard making sure that I knew exactly where the fret buzz was and once again when it comes to things like fret work and fret buzz in my guitar building course which you can order at the Galvin guitars website I go over all of that stuff okay so instead of you know doing it twice once in this video and once on that video it's better that you just get the guitar building course if you do not have that because it will tell you everything you need to do as far as repairing frets putting new frets in doing fret jobs and all that stuff on the when we put the strings on I will be checking every single note in every string okay so that way I know exactly how high I can adjust the action how low I can get it and one of the very first things I should probably mention is when it comes to setups the very first thing you should do is get the whole concept of numbers out of your head there's a lot of people that will ask hey at the 14th fret what should the height be between you know the 14th fret and the bottom of the string on the e right or what should the height of the pickups be and things like get that out of your head okay though there is no set number there are numbers that some websites will give you some manufacturers will give you but those numbers are starting points it's very much like a recipe if you are cooking and it might say use a quarter of a teaspoon of salt and a quarter of a teaspoon of pepper and after you cook it you might sit there and say it doesn't have enough salt or it doesn't have enough pepper or it has too much pepper and that is the exact same thing when you're doing a setup on a guitar it might give you a starting point but the reality is you should never go by that okay every guitar is different every player is different and you need to set it up for the player right somebody might want higher action and if you set it up to what the manufacturer says it might be too low okay some people like very low action okay and if you go by what the manufacturer says it might be too high if you change the gauge of your strings that's gonna change the height of your action and stuff like that as well so don't just get the numbers out of your head go by feel and that's the important thing go by feel go by intonation and everything like that go by what you can get away with with a particular guitar and go by the sound of it getting ready to do the pickups that's exactly what we're going to do is we're going to go by the sound we're not going to be looking at any types of heighth or anything like that because depending on the strength of the magnet inside the pickup that can change things that you can't go by the height some people say should be about an eighth of an inch three sixteenths you cannot do that if you want your guitar to sound the best it can be okay so get all that stuff out of your head now this particular guitar has a two nematic bridge the type that you would find on a Gibson and some people when placing the two nematic on there's an argument and the argument is what side should the screws be on now it's easier to make the adjustments if the screws are on the back side okay but sometimes depending you have to put it this way okay and it just depends on what kind of backing go we have these strings going now remove this when if you have a tail piece here let's say it's a Gibson you have a tail piece here you have to have a back angle that puts tension on the saddle okay if it was flat like this that would be bad if it was really extreme like that that would be bad you want it to be about right here it's close like where they've drilled those holes it's close okay now this particular bridge when I get this and I set this here the first two things that I notice is that this and this are all the way to the front okay they're all the way to the front and one of them has turned so this cannot move forward anymore and this one has not been turned so I might be able to get another sixteenth of an inch out of this when it's time to set the intonation yeah does that is this going to be a problem I don't know yet when I put the strings back on and set the intonation I will know you'll if you also if you look at these these these types of bridges make it closer you can see what's going on there's usually a spring right here that holds these screws kind of talked right now what can happen is these it can be loose and when it's loose it can cause these to vibrate and they move it up it can cause the screws to vibrate and it'll make it sound like there's some type of fret buzz going on when there is not fret buzz it's this vibrating so if that is the case what you can do is grab a flat head screwdriver and grab a flat head screwdriver and right where that spring is get it and push down okay and try to bend it I'm gonna set it I'm gonna set this where you can see me do this okay so basically right here where that spring is I'm getting this at the screwdriver and I'm pushing down on it know what that has done is it's put a V right here and it's made sure that now that there's contact between all of them except for or that one I might have to push it again like right here okay but what that does is it make sure that that these are all in contact and you won't get that that fret buzz sound because that is a common thing okay now I'm gonna see if since he's already got this adjusted in this direction I'm gonna see if the intonation is fine also another thing to keep to look at is sometimes these bridges will Bend right here if they're either there cheaply made and if they're cheaply made it mess it and it gets bent it messes with the action height on the middle strings so take a look at it make sure that this is straight or it's got a slight curve up and it follows the the actual radius of the fret board sometimes people will take these apart and not knowing that some of these saddles are at different heights right and they don't put the small one where on the outside edges and they don't put the log the taller ones in the middle so they'll put the taller one out here and they'll mix and match them not realizing it and it screws all the screws the action up over the whole thing so make sure that when you're looking at this it's got the proper radius as well so now at this point I'm going to start stringing up the guitar and after I string it up I'll turn the camera back on and we're gonna and I'm going to bring it to pitch from there we're going to do a truss rod adjustment and after we do the truss rod adjustment we'll start looking at the intonation when you first put your strings on you want to go ahead and grab them and stretch them like this and it will help help you out lock when you're you're trying to get this thing in tune you want to take that extra stretch out like this now instead of constantly retuning the thing until all the stretch finally ends up leaving so now that I've got this set up to it being in pitch I'm gonna put my straightedge which once again on this and I'm wanting to see how much relief this neck has now this neck has a lot of relief in it right now and the relief is a bend second banana it's a forward bow in the neck and some people like to have a lot of relief and other people not so much now this particular guitar it has a little bit more relief than I think it should have so I'm going to take my truss rod wrench and I'm going to tighten this a little bit now the amount of relief that you want on this is not perfectly flat what you would want is maybe a couple of business cards for the thickness something else I should cover a little bit and that's a playing position there's some people that when they are setting the truss rod when they're setting the action they do everything from the playing position and it does make it more accurate but and this is the big here it doesn't really make that big of a difference now if you have a very very thin neck it's probably a good idea that you do it in the playing position okay if you have a two-way truss rod and a thick neck or anything along those lines you can do it just like I'm doing it here only every now and then do I have to actually do stuff in the playing position the amount of drop or the amount that this sags due to gravity is insignificant okay unless once again you have a very thin neck or the truss rod isn't doesn't have any tension on it at all or maybe the headstock is very heavy something along those lines it doesn't hurt to do it in the playing position but for me it's a lot quicker to do it this way and then I fine-tune it in the playing position right get the majority of everything done like this and then do any fine-tuning that you need to do in a playing position and it's just a lot easier also I'm doing it this way so you can see exactly what I'm doing if I was doing it in the playing position it would be facing this way and there's nowhere I could put my camera right there so now that I have this now that I have all these strings setup and they're in tune and I have my truss my truss rod adjustment done and the next step is to make sure that the nut height is correct before I start doing anything with the intonation if I start messing with the intonation and the enough height isn't right it's gonna have problems I always start with the nut and then do your bridge okay so I have this set so you can see what I'm doing here now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna push down on the third fret on the high E and what I want to see is an ever so slight gap between the fret and the string okay now when I'm doing this it's hitting the string that's no good okay I want to be able to put maybe a business card between that business card is my number okay and that is touching that can create fret buzz on an open string if it's too low okay I'm gonna do the same thing with the B string that's touching the g string is touching geez the D is touching the a is touching and so is the E okay but we're not getting any front bus now ordinarily I would shim up that nut just a touch because you should have a little bit there now since I'm not getting any fret buzz on that first fret I'm gonna call it good but it's dangerously low and typically you want to be able to see a gap about the size of a business card on all of them up when you clamp down on the first fret if you see more than that then you need to get a nut file and file down the slots a little bit and lower those strings now why is it important that you lower the strings and you have the nut set to the correct of the nut the nut slots set to the correct height because if this is if this is high up that this string is high up right here and I end up pushing down right here it puts a lot of tension on the string right here and if it puts a lot of tension it increases the pitch so what will happen is if I'm doing like an open D chord what well you what you'll hear is a couple of these strings are going to be out of tune they're going to be sharp and as soon as I start playing in the upper register it sounds normal the intonation will be just fine everywhere except for when you're doing open chords so it's really important that this is set correctly generally when you buy a guitar these are always really high they're higher than they should be and so when you start doing your A's and your D cords you'll hear those sharp notes come out that sharpness is coming from an improper nut slot height now this particular one is just fine it's like I said it's dangerously low but since we're not since we're not getting any fret buzz I'm gonna leave it alone now if we were getting prep buzz either the nut has to be replaced or we have to shim the nut there is one thing about this that concerns me and that is is when it's time for me to set the action height if I try to lower it we will get fret buzz okay if I try to set the action a little bit lower than this if I raise it will will be okay but I'm not sure if I'm going to be getting prep as if I end up trying to lower the action any now looking at the action it looks pretty low already but I always try to get it as low as I can since the action height looks pretty good right now the next step for me is actually going to be the intonation on this if it if the action height did not look good I would lower the action to the point that I wanted it at and then from there I would start setting the intonation but then once again like I said you lower the action you might start getting fret buzz right here if the nut slots are incorrect this brings up the question of what is the proper action height and and I said ignore the numbers ignore the numbers and I'm going to show you right now how you figure out what the perfect action height this for your guitar and for the strings that you're using now the way that you determine that the action height is what you want to do is you want to start playing every note up the fretboard and you're listening for any fret buzz and I didn't hear any okay and you do that on every string [Music] you also want to listen for any notes that are fretting out so for instance like if I'm hitting here and my if I hit here in it and it sounds the same you know that means that up here one of the Frances is high and usually what that means is you either have to raise your action or you have to level your frets okay but basically okay so I'm not really hearing a lot of fret buzz or anything on this so what I would try to do is I would try to lower the bridge a little bit and then I would do the exact same test again and I would keep doing it until I got prep buzz and then after I get prep bus I back the bridge up again just a hair and in order to get rid of what fret buzz I created by lowering the action and the action height on this right now is pretty low but I think I can get a little bit lower and I'm going to do this in the playing position and I'm gonna just lower the bridge just a little bit at a time until I start hearing fret bus as soon as I hear fret bus then I'm gonna lift the bridge back up again now when I was lowering the action on this you hear that that's the first fret that's because of the note [Music] okay and because of that I can probably lower the action a little bit more but the nut either has to be replaced or I have to shim it so what I'm going to do is I'm going to contact the owner of the guitar and ask him what what route he wants me to go because ultimately at the end of the day it's his money and it's his decision and I can still continue doing the rest of the setup without the nut really being perfect right now I can still set the intonation pretty close but it needs the nut nice is an issue that needs to be addressed so at this point I contact the owner and depending on what they say that's how I go about doing it so I spoke to the owner and the owner said let's replace the nut so I'm going to replace it with Buffalo a buffalo horn now before I do that because it's close enough I can set the intonation and when setting the intonation on any guitar okay that's adjustable of course acoustics not so much if you understand the basic principle behind it you can say intonation on any electric guitar and it's real simple okay we have a scale length and this is twenty five and a half inches dead center is 12 inches on the twelfth fret okay and when we hit this in this tune in tune okay and we have this perfectly in tune what we want to do is we want to hold down the twelfth fret and then hit it again and we should get exactly one octave up okay on the twelfth fret of these you can also do it on the 24th okay now intonation is the adjustment of making sure that the scale length is correct but it also takes an account for the pressure that you put down on the string which stretches the string okay and it's important that when you're setting the intonation that you set it the way the person plays it okay so if they have a very heavy hand and they really have a death grip when they're fretting notes you need to intonate it by squeezing hard if they have a very light touch you need to intonate it with a very light touch okay it's I can I usually get it right on the money very close but depending on who's playing it I tell them you might have to do an ever so slight adjustment depending on your playing style okay but generally it's it's good to go one thing that you need to kind of keep an eye out for is if you have very tall frets okay there's a chance more often than not that the intonation will go a little sharp when you push down on it if you have scalloped fretboard the same thing okay as a tendency going a little sharp so may make sure that you're pushing down correctly on the France when you're doing your intonation okay so let's you can use just any tuner to do it now what I usually do is use a tuner like this and then afterwards before I ship it out I end up taking it to my strobe tuner in my office and I end up fine-tuning it with a strobe tuner okay so let's do an example here now I'm hoping the camera picks this up so I'm going to hit the open E and you'll see that it's gone sharp so I need to get this down a little bit this since this is new I can get some stretch out of the string like this without you and adjusting the tuning and I'll end up getting this closer sometimes it just takes a little bit of a stretch there's still considerable amount of stretch any strings now when you first hit a string it's always going to go a little sharp [Music] and then it balances out like right there okay so that's pretty close so what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to fret to 12 and I'm gonna hit it again and you'll see that this time the needle is on this side it's flat just a little bit it's off a couple of cents now if it's flat okay that means that the saddle needs to go toward the 12th fret if it's sharp it needs to go away from the 12th fret so that's saying that this saddle right here it needs to come closer this way okay now we have a slight problem this saddle can't move that far forward anymore okay it's pretty much at its it's almost at its max but what I'm going to do is I'm gonna see how far I can get it forward hopefully that's enough because if it's not what I'm gonna have to do is take this settle out and flip it around so the flat side is out here and that will give me a little bit of extra play there we go okay so the e has been set and I'm going to do this to each string now it's important to notice that if when you when you have the string in tune open okay if it's ever so slightly off that little bit is off gets amplified when you do the 12th fret so if you see it only a half cent off when it's open when you fret it it might be two or three cents off when you fret okay so it's important to get it as close as you can to get on okay this needs to come forward more now one thing to keep in mind is and let me see if I can do it this is a light touch right here that's me pushing hard so do you see that it's important that you know what the person's touch is like before you start trying to set the intonation because if they push really really hard you're not going to set it right let me loosen the string because it'll make the saddle move a lot easier now I don't know if I can get that much out of this I'm gonna have to flip this one as well okay so right here you'll see I'm almost not a cent a cent offer so which basically means this does have to be flipped now before I flip this I'm gonna check the other the other strings as well to see if I have to flip any of those because I want to do it all at the same time the D and the a have to be flipped around okay so I'm going to loosen the strings so now that I've got these strings loosen I'm going to go ahead and remove these these screws and I have to kind of get that spring out of the way a little bit there and I'm going to just keep turning this until it comes out and then I'm going to flip that saddle around so I went ahead and I've loosened this and I've got this where I can get this take it out flip it around and put it in this way so I have this all the way forward now on the D put that back and I have to do the exact same thing to the a okay so the egg is okay now and also keep in mind that if you are changing the gauge of strings you will also have to set the intonation again sometimes not so much and then other times you have to set it a lot the D is very close but it's not it's not exact and I've got this thrown all the way forward and flipped that's really the best I'm going to be able to do with that because of the way that this is built where we can't really change the position of the bridge now if you look at this you'll see that all of these are really thrown far forward which means the manufacturer really should have brought this forward about an eighth of an inch when they ended up making this it's a design flaw you know it is what it is but you're just trying to get it as close as you can possibly get it sometimes you can change the intonation by raising the bridge or lowering the bridge but see we already have low action so we can't really lower it anymore now what you can do if you have like a bolt-on neck this is a set neck but if you have a bolt-on neck you can sometimes mess around with the intonation a little bit by putting a shim on the very front of it underneath that will cause it to have a slight back angle this way that will end up increasing the string length if you need to that's if you need to expand it sometimes you can even put a shim the very front of the neck so it doesn't set so far into the pocket that will also expand it this is actually something that we need to shrink okay and there's really no way for us to be able to do that because this is a set neck there's very little we can do and this is so close this is so close to being in perfect intonation that we can call it good you know they do make things you can buy at still matcom and what it is is they're they're pieces that you can slide you take this bridge off you slide it over the pole pieces and then you put this on that new the new piece and it's offset a little bit and it gives you an opportunity to kind of move these things around a little bit give yourself a little bit of extra room you can purchase those things they look awkward but it does fix to the the problem of the intonation now the intonation on this now is good enough for me to say that it's it's done and it's fine but like I said before I ship these out I always take it to the strobe tuner in my office and verify so now we're going to set the height of the pickups okay and it doesn't require a full-on amp to do this you can use a little amp like this and what I'm going to do a little battery-powered in and plug this guy in [Music] to a clean Channel and you'll hear that with this distance right here this still sounds good it's a little thin but it sounds pretty good now when you're just in the height of these some people say it should be an eighth of an inch or maybe 3/16 or something along those lines and you can't go by that you have to go by the way the guitar sounds and then I'm doing this I'm not hearing a lot of the bass so I'm like raising the bass side [Music] every note should have the same loudness to it okay we should be able to hear those equally and now I'm going to test all the other strings it seems that the e is the only one that's a little a little low so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use this pole piece to get that by raising this pole piece up it does an in do it does an individual loudness for that and the D and the a sound like they could be raised a little bit as well [Music] probably wouldn't hurt to have this side come up just a little bit more maybe lower this sigh just a touch there we go that sounds good and you'll see that now every note is the same loudness but this pickup is actually at a very site a slight slant and also I've got these pole pieces raised if we were to go by the manufacturers recommendations it wouldn't be like that that's what I'm saying you cannot go by the numbers you have to go by the sound of it so now what we have to do is we have to make sure that the loudness of this is the same as the loudness of this and we're going to be doing it the exact same way so where you go that's too quiet so what we do is we raise this up when you get your pick up too close to the strings it can sound a little funny because of the shape of the magnetic field around the pickup we have a field that's running from the tops of these poles around like this okay and we want it to be caught in that magnetic field where it's the largest if we end up bringing this too close we're really only getting a little bit of that magnetic field right here and then right here is where you're going to be getting the rest and it can sound wobbly like it'll sound a little strange if it's too close if it's too far away it will sound clean but it'll sound a little thin okay and also if you get it too close so you can also have it where it sounds a little distorted so you're trying to find that happy medium that's too loud and the neck pickup is more sensitive than the bridge pickup because of where it's located there's more vibration here than there is here okay so this will have a tendency to be louder than this [Music] I could probably lower just a little bit more [Music] [Music] [Music] okay that's pretty good so now what I'm going to do is the exact same thing that I did with this with the pole pieces [Music] the low man needs to come up just a little bit that's good that needs to be lowered fine get the screwdriver in there [Music] oh it needs to be lowered [Music] there needs to be lowered the a needs to be raised to be lowered this actually needs to be raised [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so now that these have been these have been set now where it's not going to be distorted it's set where you get a clean sound it's set where you get a good amount of it set where you get a good amount of volume it's set where every string it's really close to the exact same loudness and we're good so these pickups have been set now I'm moving this back and forth and I'm listening for any types of crackling or clicks or anything like that and I'm gonna do the same with the volume knob same with the two so it seems that the contact cleaner worked and what we're going to do is we're gonna get this and we're going to flip it over there's one more thing that I need to check that I haven't done yet and that is the output Jack okay because there is the possibility that we have one stray wire from the ground that might be hitting the positive and causing it to every now and then short out and if it does that you lose all of your sound okay so just to be safe we're going to go ahead and pop this up pop this out and look make sure that the wires are not broken nothing frayed touching something else and we're okay now looking at this remember how I said that one screw didn't really it was loose and it didn't really feel like there was anything attached to it now I'm going to show you how you can fix that but this particular one is going to require a little bit more work in order for that to happen now if I remove this this shim right here there is wood that has been removed okay it's gone it's because this was drilled too close and it popped off okay so that requires a little bit more work but let's say for instance it's not like that let's say it's just a hole here that's a little bit too big what you do is you just get a toothpick and you dip it in wood glue you stuff it inside there and take a razor or a very sharp knife and you just cut it flush to that and you let the glue dry and then you have you'll have what you would that you can grab to you can do the exact same thing with a neck that a bolt-on neck that has though it's a little loose right from where the screw goes in it's loose stuff about five or six toothpicks inside there with some wood glue let it dry cut it off flush you might have to drill a pilot hole again but then stick that in there and it will it'll go ahead and fix that so it'll grab again if it doesn't work if that's still not enough then you don't have a choice but to drill out the hole and then glue a dowel inside of it and then read your ii drill a pilot hole if it doesn't work on the neck but this right here i'm going to show you a trick to this what we can do is we can get a piece of tape so i take a piece of tape and then i run it on the inside of this okay pretty much just like that and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to be mixing some epoxy and pouring it inside that hole and letting it set up and after I do that I'm going to try to read roll a hole inside there and see if I can get it to grab if that doesn't work the next step and this is a lot of work for one little screw but the next step would be to take a chisel and cut this out square and then glue a small block inside there and after that dries Reed rill the hole and it'll work but I'm gonna try to get it to work with epoxy sometimes you can even use superglue for it to grab now what what I'm going to do is for the sake of ease here we're going to see if we can get superglue to work so I've got superglue gel here it usually takes a few seconds for this to harden up when you put the accelerant on it now I try not to get too much accelerant on the finish because it can actually damage the finish depending on the type of finish that it is okay but it does dry really fast and now that that hole is filled up we're gonna see if after I drill a small pilot hole if it fixes that I'm using a very very small bit and inside here there's going to be a little bit of a uber glue that has not completely dried yet so what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit this with accelerant like that and then try to get this in as fast as I can and the superglue will set up and form in the shape of the screw like that so now it's it's it's in there and it's holding okay so that works is it the greatest fix no it's not ideal but you know we're dealing with a piece of wood that's missing it is what it is so at this point except for the nut that I have to replace this is finished and one of the very last things that I'll usually do is I will put on a wax on the outside of this a car wax let it dry and then kind of buff it out by hand with a lint-free cloth to take any fingerprints or anything off of it make it look everything look real nice and I do that on the front and the back and I just want this to look real nice so when I end up sending it back to the guy it looks good and also another thing that you can do is with black hardware you can always take a sharpie and go over the tops of these things to anywhere that you see has been scratched or scraped or you start seeing a little rust or something along those lines you just go over it to hide any of the wear that's on there you can do that on the front and the rear of course like where we were just working like on these screws now everything on this is good to go except for the nut and as far as the nut goes if you want to know how to build a nut on my youtube channel on wills easy guitar if you at my personal channel if you go there I have a video up that shows you exactly how to build nuts how to make your own guitar nuts and it's free so if you need to know how to do that it's there for the taking there's also one more thing I want to talk about before I go to the next guitar and that is your bridge and the radius on the bridge okay that's built in it or what's adjustable sometimes they're adjustable like on a fender it's adjustable but a rate the the fretboard typically has one measurement for the radius 12 inches 14 inch radius something along those lines sometimes our compound radius okay which basically means maybe up here at 16 and then down here it's 12 okay and your bridge needs to reflect that it needs to reflect this because if let's say for instance you have a 14 inch radius or 12 inch radius on your bridge and your neck on the other hand is 16 inch radius you might have some strings closer to the fretboard than others okay and so the action height will be good on some of them but another ones they'll be way way high if if for instance so let's say that this was 16 inches a 16 inch radius right here and let's say that this was a 12 inch radius okay what that would mean is basically the two hiiis you could get close to the fret board but everything in the middle you couldn't right so it would have higher action in the middle it would be nothing you could do about that if this on the other hand was a 12 inch radius or a 9 inch radius or something that and then this was maybe like 16 then the exact opposite is true what happens is you can get low action here but then the action out here is high okay so it's it's important that you you know you know what radiuses you're dealing with and if it's the correct bridge there's been times people have sent me a guitar that they ended up changing the bridge out on and when they change the bridge they had no idea what the radius was on the fret board and they said I can't get the action right I can't get the intonation I can't get this could you do something and you look at me and say it's the wrong bridge right or it's the wrong it's the wrong radius and so because of that there's very little anybody can do unless you change the radius of the fretboard or you get the correct bridge right generally the best bridges are the ones that you can actually adjust the radius on and some people think you cannot adjust the radius on the fret up Floyd Rose you can but it requires gems but this is good to go and I think we can go to the next guitar so this is an interesting one this is a squire that someone had bought from a pawn shop for $40 and they asked me if I could turn it into a very good Squire and I said yes I can so everything has been taken apart on this and you get all these screws out of here no the springs get the bridge out of here this is a perfect example do you see the Sprint port this is a dry fretboard this needs oil okay this is what happens when you use degreasers or whatnot to clean your fretboard this is what happens when you might use something like alcohol to clean your fretboard this is what happens when it's in a very dry environment this is why you want to use oil every now and then to clean your fretboard not to clean your fretboard but to in a way rehydrate and also I want to show you something here they say fender makes quality instruments and they're great now this is Squire but it's still owned by fender look at that fret marker you see something wrong with it [Music] that is way too far forward that should be back here I've seen that even on regular Stratocasters I've seen it on Gibson's you know everything from the factory is not perfect so looking at this neck we're going to be doing the same thing looking at this neck I I can't tell if this is gong curve this is from where they ended up cleaning it okay but I'm going to end up cleaning the fretboard just like I did earlier and putting oil on it and I'm right now what I'm doing is I'm holding this up at an angle and I'm looking at these frets to see if any of these frets are sticking out of the fretboard looking to see if I can see any dents and they're friends anything that might be something that's going to end up creating a problem when it comes to trying to set this up sometimes you have to do a front job on on something like this okay but I think I can I think this is OK the the frets are kind of low there note there when you have low small front sight distant honest vintage frets and as long as as long as they're pretty close to being level I can make this work okay so what I'm going to do is just like I did before I'm going to end up doing on this one I'm going to do some liquid gold and spray it on there let it set and then clean it up [Music] [Music] there's a little bit of dirt on there but not a lot somebody had cleaned it with a degreaser you can you can tell because it sucked all the oil out of the top layer probably now there's something here I don't know what that is I don't know what that is in cases like this this is what I was talking about you can kind of come in with a razor and remove the gunk that you see close to the fret when you when you see a lot of it sometimes you sometimes you can't really what is that sometimes you can't scrub it off yeah it's a little dirty but not bad okay now look at the difference between the color of this now compared to what it was okay that that's how you can tell any of a dry fretboard okay so here's it how do you know when trust me you know it looks dry and that is horrible for your guitar fretboard you need to have a thin coat of oil on it this right here is enough oil it's going to absorb and it's going to start dialling again probably in an hour it'll still look dark like this but it's going to absorb the oil that it ended up losing from when it was cleaned or whatever there's this fretboard is in pretty rough shape this is not the fender nut fender never should have or Squier or whatever they never should have used this piece of wood or they should have filled it because there's the you know areas like this over here there's gaps or gouges there's a gouge right here up in the near the fret up here there is stuff missing they never should have used this but it is what it is you know what when you're doing setups and stuff all you know you can and moan all you want about how well they build something but it's your job to overcome that and this is going to have to be cleaned really well but this for now I can set this to the side now this looks like one of the it looks like one of these guitars that somebody would get off eBay that that somebody would claim was signed by somebody and it never is it's always like the same signature you know it'll say like oh this was signed by eddie van hey van halen or something and you you look at all the signatures and they're all this the same you know and people will always end up trying to sell that guitar for hundreds and hundreds of dollars and usually it's always on the cheapest type of strat you can get and it's just a picard that's been signed and quite honestly i would never I would never purchase anything like that it you know it just junk now when you end up getting dirty knobs you can soak this in oxy clean and clean these guys up there's a lot of there's a lot of junk that's on this fretboard I mean on this pic art I don't like and so this is all going to be removed i'ma Tevan no I can't even make out what that says it looks like it says Rowe Higgins or can-can ham I I have no idea what that says this screw is loose so the toothpick trick would work really well for that right there but I have to take this off and make sure that everything underneath is kosher same thing as before I don't know if any of this works at all everything looks to be original it looks like it had been in a moist environment for a long time because I can see rust in different areas maybe it was by the beach or something but I'm going to come in here spray the Konquest contact cleaner I'm going to do the same thing inside the pox a lot of times you don't need to change the pots you just you just need to clean them okay after those are in once again back and forth back and forth trying to clean this guy up this is a horrible switch once again visual inspection you're looking to see if there's any broken strings you're looking to see if the solder joints are bad you're looking for anything that's bad also keep a really close eye on foreground right make sure that things are grounded a lot of times somebody will not have a ground on their guitar and okay like oh I'm always getting this sound or I'm you know this that or the other thing and it's just like something's not grounded and that happens more often than not if you are gonna have to clean a guitar body I generally will use Windex and then afterwards if I need to buff it or something it will usually be fine in this case I'm not going to really bother with the the wax just because of the condition of the body but I am going to clean this this stuff up because it's nasty Windex will take oil up and take dirt off all that other stuff and it'll leave it where it's streak free I'm gonna let that soak in there because there's a lot of crud and I'm only going to do the top for now and then later on I'll do the sides in the back but uh let that set for a second then come in here and try to get all this stuff off of here nobody wants to play a dirty guitar and I don't want to work on one so I try to I try to clean this stuff up so what I've got is my handy dandy type 1 2 actually it's too much glue kind of put that like this and break that piece off like that take the other side right here that's sharp jam it in there do the exact same thing to this one break that off that's another reason why I think that this is basswood because these stripped so easily and basswood is very very thin I mean it's a nut fin it's it's very weak it's not strong at all so cut these off flush about 15 minutes that glue will be dry and will be fine and you could do the exact same thing when I just did there for the neck so let's say somebody ends up saying hey one of these things is really it doesn't grab very well you're gonna just start stuffing a bunch of toothpicks inside there with wood glue hammer them down in there then cut them off flush after it completely dries then you can go ahead and give it a shot and see if that will end up grabbing the screw it usually works and if not then you have to drill it out now I'm only going to be putting a couple in here right now in areas that I can see are fairly clean like areas that are dirty I'm not I'm not gonna really do it and almost everything is dirty but I just need to to kind of hold this in place and once again I'm gonna I'm gonna hit it I'm gonna hit this with Windex and don't worry the Windex will not damage the pickup sir thing like that yeah this had this had to have been near an ocean or something because while I'm in California but a lot of these metal parts are rusted and they shouldn't rest that much unless they're near like salt water or a really moist environment I have seen people that have had guitars that they store next to their saltwater aquarium and their guitar becomes just a rust monster so let me try something else to get this off now some of the lighter solvents that I tried using really wasn't working and I still have a little bit of residual root that kind of went in there so it forces me to use something that's a little bit more nasty which is going to melt the plastic a touch I can always wet sand and buff this and any of that will disappear now there's still a little bit of some stuff that it doesn't look good but I can always use like a little bit of this on there and a little bit of polishing compounds like this I could go in with just a simple rag just like this and it will take out the majority of those little marks from the solvent I can buff out a little bit more later but I can tell already that that's made a world of difference so the next step is putting the screws back in oh look at that did you see how that just went right in there this is another toothpick trick that we're gonna have to do now we're going to the next step and the next step is a installing the tremolo now let's take a look at this tremolo ooh rust rust rust look at all that rust what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a compressed air I'm going to blow this out man there's a lot of rust in that and I'm going to hit this with three in one oil and I'm going to let it I'm gonna let it absorb in all these including the saddle adjusters I won't be able to set any intonation or any action high or anything like that if these are not going to be budging so I'm I'm really going to strafe the hell out of these screws and let it sit I can clean up the extra oil later so I'm gonna let that sit for about 10 or 15 minutes and just let it kind of get inside there real well and then I'm going to take the air compressor again and blow all that extra oil off and then I just have to wipe a little bit and we'll go ahead and set this in place and I'm hoping we're not going to have to do the toothpick trick for these guys now generally when you put these screws in you want you want to go you want to keep the the trim plate flat against the body okay and you lower these until it touches the trim plate and it starts raising the rear of it like right there it starts raising the rear back it off until it's flush again to the to the body okay now there's some people that will have this up even higher right they they kind of like they're they're trimmed to set like this I personally don't think that's a good idea not with not with a fender because a Fender doesn't really do that well as a floating trim it's really hard to keep in tune unless you have like a roller nut and roller string trees or string tees depending on how you want to call it now like this what it does is that if it makes it where it's setting tight against the body so you won't be able to do any this one could use the toothpick trick and it's probably good enough but it's kind of loose what it'll do is it allowed to do dives but when we put the string tension on it the spring tension it will always come back to its original position against the body and it will make it where the guitar stays in tune a lot better one of the most frustrating things in the world is trying to get one of a Fender tuff style bridge to stay in tune it can be done but it takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of finesse now what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn all of these making sure that they can freely move which they can so far which is good because when I start doing the adjustments on this for the intonation I want to make sure I don't run into any problems I want to do it now before there's a huge issue and now we also have to lower all of these height adjusts that's another problem I often see with a lot of these guitars is the way that they have these saddle height adjustment screws they're either too far out or they're too far in ideally you want them to be right around flush to the top and the way that you can make sure that happens is when you set the neck and I'll show you about setting the neck here in just a minute if these are not even with one another in other words one side is higher than the other on these what you're going to end up getting is a vibration sound it's gonna sound almost like fret buzz so now that we have all of that it's time to set the neck now I've got these strings on here I haven't removed any of the strings and what I need to do is try to get this unwound and untangled so that way when I put it on all the strings are exactly where they're supposed to be I'm gonna from here what I'm going to do is I'm going to lessen the string tension on these until I can get it to lower a little bit because that's too much tension that's currently on here like that now what I'm going to do from here is I'm actually going to start putting tension on the on the beat on the strings especially on the high E and the low E and I'll explain why in just a second I have it roughly where it belongs I come back here and I want to make this I want to make this not super tight but I want it to but I want it to be somewhat tight I want all of these to be in but just not cranked down okay so I have these I have these in there pretty well I want to get this to be tight against here but not cranked okay something like that alright so now that I've got that in there what I need to do is I need to adjust the angle of the neck okay and what I want to do is I want to make sure that the distance from the e to the outside here and the e to the outside here are the same and I'm going to do that by grabbing the neck and shifting it back and forth okay so now that that is in place I'm going to release the tension on the strings now so I can put the springs on the tram system some people will ask should you ever put these at an angle it depends putting them at an angle only increases the tension of the spring so you have to ask yourself do you need to really increase the tension of it also sometimes you have to add more than three Springs sometimes three Springs is too much tension somebody will remove one messing around with the springs as far as their position their length the number of them changes the way that the trim will feel it changes the dynamics of the the tremolo so you can experiment and find out what feels best for you generally three Springs fairly straight on is good enough now I would prefer to get this and put it over here but because they put the ground on there I don't think that this is going to sit there well and any time some I use as a trim it might rub against that and make a noise sometimes people will also complain about the Springs making too much noise what you can do is take a rubber tube like surgical tubing and run it through the springs and that will make it where the it deadens Springs and a silences them okay so what we'll do now I don't know if let me take this let's cover off I'm not even sure why it's on it huh toothpick trick or that yeah this has got to be bats what it's too soft to be anything else what in the hell is this there's all sorts of stuff on here okay so I don't know if this is gonna be the proper spring tension until I actually bring these up to tune okay when I bring these up to pitch the nut is bad I can already tell this high e is horrible it keeps wanting to come off so I'm gonna plug plug this in and I'm gonna bring all this up to pitch okay so we have all of these adjusting screws flush to the top and ideally that's where they they should be real close to that so they're not digging into anybody's hand and also they're not sticking way way up either because that's that's awkward but the problem is the action here is ridiculously high okay so this is where back angle of the neck starts coming into play things that have a set neck like like a Les Paul or something they already have a back Engle and those are typically about two degrees or so and when you have a bolt-on neck and you have to put a backing on it there's a couple ways you can do it but generally the the easiest way that works is putting a shim in the very very front of this some people will use hard cardboard like something you'd get off of a cereal box and it works but I generally will use thin pieces of veneer and it doesn't take a lot it you know something you know maybe about like that is more than enough so what I'm going to do is I'm going to I'm going to take the neck off again and I'm gonna I'm gonna push him inside the pocket and tighten it back down and give this a slight back angle some people are worried that when you you do that it's going to affect the tone in some way or it's going to affect a sustained and it doesn't okay so don't worry about that but this is just entirely too high and what I want to do is when the back angle when I went to shim this I want this to be pretty close to the strings you know the frets pretty close to the string not touching but pretty close to it and then that will give me room to do the adjustments over here but I don't want to do anything with intonation or anything or action heights until I get that shim inside there you'll see that this is a common problem where people either have too large of a shim and it causes the saddles to be way way too high or what happens is they don't have enough of one and then they lower this and then these poke their hands so let me remove the neck and I'll show you basically how I go about doing this so I have the neck off and now I have a piece of veneer and what I'm going to do is I'm going to get this piece and just break it off or fold it doesn't make a difference where both of these pieces are going to be setting just like that and without tightening the neck I'm going to put this back in and see if that is going to be enough height there to give me the back angle that I need when I push down on this and you'll see by me just putting that one little petal bit in there this is almost touching the strings and in some case and in some cases it is so I'm going to say that that is good and I'm going to go ahead and tighten the neck back down so now that I've got that done you'll see that the action is still a little bit high but it's not going to take me a lot to mess around with the bridge to set the action height on this but it's a lot better it probably wouldn't hurt to even just put one more little piece inside there but I'm gonna see how far I can get with this as long as the saddles do not protrude too much we should be okay so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and get this in tune and after I get this in tune I'm going to go ahead and set the intonation okay so I have this this pretty close to being in tune it doesn't have to be perfectly in tune and now what I'm going to do is before I set the intonation I'm going to try to lower the action as much as I can and how I'm going to determine what the proper height of the action is going to be is in the playing position I'm going to be just going up each fret trying to hear any type of fret bus if I don't hear any fret bus then what I'm going to do is I'm going to lower I'm going to lower the saddle a little bit and I'm going to keep doing that until I hear prep bus as soon as I hear fret bus I'm gonna raise the saddle a little bit until it goes away and then that way I know I have the optimum height for the action it's as low as I can get it but I'm going to do that for each one of these as soon as I have that done then I can go ahead and start pulling around with the intonation but right now the most important thing is trying to get this action height done you don't want to set the intonation before the action height as soon as you set the action if you do that and you start fooling around with the action high your intonation is going to go out okay so like I said what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go through on each note just like this and when I keep doing it listening for fret paws if I don't hear any I'm gonna lower the the saddle now also make sure that your neck is straight so your neck is exactly like it's supposed to be before you start doing this and as soon as I do as soon as I'm done with this we'll start doing the intonation okay so I went ahead and I did that and I lowered all the saddles and as low as I could get him and measuring at the 12th fret right here I'm actually getting a sixteenth of an inch between the bottom of the e string and the top of the fret which is actually pretty good and so this is this is pretty low action right here and there's a couple of spots that I'm getting ever so slight fret buzz but it's it's not bad enough that I have to set there and worry about it it's it's very very very slight and when you as soon as you would plug this in to an amp you wouldn't hear any of it so sometimes a very very small amount of fret buzzes okay it's just when it's real pronounced and also it's kind of deadening the string a little bit that's when you have to worry about it but right now the way that I have this the action height is good so the next step that now is getting all of these in tune and as soon as all of these are in tune I'm going to start adjusting the intonation now just like before what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that this string is exactly at E when it's open and then I'm going to fret the 12th and I'm going to hit it again and see where it's at amazingly enough it's it's right here it's about where it's supposed to be let me try the a and the a is about where it's supposed to be so is the D [Music] now this this nut is horrible these are actually almost right on the money just by sheer coincidence which is really bizarre but just like before if it were to be sharp when I were to do the 12th fret then what I would do is I would I would screw this tighter and bring the settle back this way and if it if it was something that was flat then what I would do is I would loosen the screw and have it have the settle go in this direction and I would do that on each one of these but interestingly enough they're all right around exactly where they're supposed to be so I'm going to end up doing the fine-tuning on this with a strobe tuner I'm actually surprised that that turned out just by sheer chance that it's exactly where it's supposed to be now let's go ahead and talk a little bit about string teas or steam string trees depending on who you talk to now the purpose of these guys is if you notice the height of where the string goes into the tuner okay is almost the same height as the nut okay and because of this week we might get a sitar sound we might not get a really full clean tone when we're playing so in order for us to make everything sound just right and not have these actually pop out of their respective place in the nut what we do is we get these and we stick them underneath the string tree or string tea basically like that okay now on a trim system what that usually means is this is going to be a binding point okay there's going to be friction on these and the friction is going to make it when you start tuning it it's going to grab here and you're going to have to kind of move these back and forth and squeeze to loosen that friction and you know repeatedly do that until you can actually get your string in tune because if you don't what might happen is you're going to keep cranking and cranking and cranking and cranking and nothing is you're not going to see any change on the tuner and then all of a sudden it's gonna go clink and then it's going to go sharp okay and the friction here is one of the main reasons why a non-locking tremolo like a fender style tremolo is so horrible and the same with right here we have friction with in the nut slots and the way that we can kind of overcome that is we can actually install roller trees or roller tees just depends once again on who you're talking to you what they're going to call them and the rollers help get rid of that friction okay and some people will put a roller nut on to in order to get rid of some of that friction you can put graphite with inside the nut slots that works you can even put a little bit of beeswax underneath the string tree inside here in these areas and that will help a little bit if depending on the the type of neck you have and depending on the kind of tuners you have if the strings will stay in the nut slot without having this be active another in other words if you could have it like that it's better to have it like that if you're going to be using the trim okay because it reduces the friction it gets rid of it then you have a much greater chance of your guitar staying in tune when you do a dive and stuff like that now the way that this neck is built and everything like that I'm gonna have to use these string trees so I can put a little bit of beeswax underneath there I can even use graphite graphite it's going to end up kind of wearing out sometimes people will put three in one oil underneath it on the string just to help prevent some of that but these guys are usually a culprit for why your strap will not stay in tune it only costs a couple dollars to get rollers for these and it makes a world of difference so if somebody's having a lot of problems with its think staying in tune this is the very first thing that you should think about replacing the next thing that you should think about replacing is the nut now this nut needs to be replaced this is this is horrible the e is very loose inside here and it wants to keep popping out so this nut I'm going to have to replace so after I retuned it I double check the intonation and I saw that these two guys were actually a little out so I brought them further back this way and now they're good to go so this is pretty much set up I do have to replace the nut on it but there's one thing that we haven't checked now I mean I do have to clean the knobs and put the knobs back on but there's one thing I haven't checked yet and that's the electron because this was taken apart when I got it so now I have to plug it in and make sure all the pickups sound the way that they're supposed to sound and also make sure that the the pots are working the way that the pots are supposed to be working and adjust the pickup height just like I did in the other videos you'll notice on this particular guitar let me come in let me zoom in right here okay that this is still flush against the body this is still flushed okay now that means that there's enough spring tension if this were to have start angling forward this way it would be a sign that what we should do is actually tighten the springs a little bit now what I'm going to do after I know everything is set up and everything's perfect I'm going to start loosening the springs the spring tension in the back until this wants to start moving forward ever so slightly and then I'm going to tighten them down a little bit more I want to have the tension up here on the strings be the same on the springs and the tension gets adjusted by these two screws right here so after everything is said and done I'm gonna go ahead and start reducing the spring tension so that way if I do do a dive or something along those lines with the guitar here I don't have to you know put Superman's strength behind it it'll it'll dive easy but when I let go the springs will have enough tension that it'll suck it right back into the position that it's currently in and that's important so here's a couple of tips though to try to keep your strat in tune a little bit better the very first thing is always stretch your strings you want to stretch these guys out before you start playing it right just like I was showing you earlier you having you bend another thing that you can do is you can grab a piece of wood or something that is hard that is blunt and right up here next to the saddle you want to push down on the string and by doing that you're going to be putting a kink in it right there but what that does is well it's going to stretch a spurt a string so I'm going to have to retune after this but what it does is it kind of locks them in place right here so if you do do a dive they'll be more prone to stay in this position and they won't kind of get loose in that block underneath this so that's a good tip so now we have to check the electronics on this and make sure that everything sounds okay so these are single coils and they're going to be picking up RF signals they're going to always be picking up some type of hum and with a battery-powered amp it helps a little bit but I have fluorescent lights above me and that's what we're hearing inside the VM so I set this to the bridge position and this is out of tune because I did push down on these but that's okay and we can hear that the the low end is much stronger and more present than the high okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to raise the treble side and I'm going to lower the base sight [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] the batteries are dying I am that's why it sounds to store [Applause] he raised this up just a touch now that I have this we're about where I wanted and once again lowering its going to make it cleaner but the output is going to drop bringing it up is going to have the output increase but it's going to start getting muddy and if you start getting too close it's going to start sounding like warbly so be careful with that find you're happy you're happy spot that sounds good to me so now I'm going to come up here [Applause] [Music] and raise this up just a little bit there is something very very wrong with this and that's one of the reasons why I couldn't get everything to sound quite right and at the same volume if I put this all in the bridge position and I tap on these whole pieces I'm not getting anything if I come over here I'm getting it on the middle pick up right if I bring this over to the center and I'm not getting anything over there so okay so the pickguard has to come off I have to look at what in the world is going on here I have a feeling somebody tried to rewire this and they didn't know what they were doing but no matter what this should be on that this position and this should not be on that position that's that's just craziness I was wondering why I couldn't get the I couldn't get the volume to be right when I was moving these things back and forth and I was wondering why it sounded strange it's because a maniac was using this that adjusted it last so I'm gonna have to take off the strings which is which is fine because they needed to be replaced anyway and I have to take the pick art off again and examine the electronics because that is simply crazy and when you're doing setups for other people you never know what you're going to get sometimes they say I haven't I haven't done anything I haven't adjusted anything everything's factory and you you open you open it up and you look in there and you could tell somebody messed with it and they just were too embarrassed to tell you that well they basically messed it up now these pickups look fairly original and the wiring looks to be about right but there's one thing that is different you'll notice that this is white this is white this is black and the problem that we're having is this and this need to be swapped okay and I'm assuming that the reason why this is black and this is white is because it the manufacturers trying to tell you which side is north and which side is south so that way you end up getting some hum cancellation when you end up putting you know the middle position between these two pickups and between these two pickups now let me see let me see if I'm right so I've got my compass here and it's pointing north right there and if I come over here that's pointing South okay so yeah okay so that's exactly what's going on somebody ended up taking these pickups out and then they just moved them around into the wrong position so let me I don't know why somebody would do such a thing now let's say for instance this is a pickup that has staggered pole pieces which is quite common for strat type guitars where this would be low this would be kind of low these two would be sticking up this would be lower than all of them and then this one would be higher than that one that would go to the B string okay and you would want to put this back in so it would be set up exactly like it's supposed to be if you have this thing flipped upside down where the staggered piece was you know at the a string it would sound funny it wouldn't quite sound right so you'd have to pay attention to that as well now this particular guitar has Springs underneath the screws and for the pickups and sometimes they'll be surgical tubing there to act as the spring instead of an actual spring so let me make sure all the wires are where they're supposed to be and sometimes those deteriorate so you'll want to keep it you'll want to look for that and if you see this deteriorated you're going to want to go ahead and change them out because if not what's going to end up happening is when you try to adjust the pickup height you're going to have problems this feels like something is yeah is getting in the way there we go so let's go ahead and test this again [Music] [Applause] so do you hear the the the hum cancellation single coil no hum but these two are active hum cancellation that's active okay so everything now should be much easier to adjust okay so now that now that the pickups have been put in the way that they're supposed to be put in the only thing I should have to do now is just change the strings put a new set of strings on and tune it up and everything should be fine at this point now let's go ahead and talk a little bit about your tuning machines here these are this tuning machine is very loose okay because these are cheap they're not some of the best tuning machines in the world now when you have a tuning machine that is very loose like this what can happen is it will not really want to stay in tune because there's a lot of play in there between the gears so you know you might have to kind of turn it and then bring it back and turn it and bring it back and things like that in order to get the thing to be in tune if it becomes a problem it's better just to change the tuners buy new tuners put them in there's some people out there that say oh you never have to replace tuners that is a crock sometimes you have to replace them if they're poorly made like this e there's a lot of tension on this compared to this one where it's it's very very loose sometimes let's go ahead and flip this guy okay sometimes you'll actually have to take these off and then oil inside there every now and then sometimes you won't be able to all inside there depending on who manufactured them and how they made them but just keep that in mind sometimes you will have to put some oil on the tuners you'll know when you need to so I'm going to change the strings on this and put new strings adjust the pickups like I was doing earlier change the batteries in the amplifier and then after that this is finished all you have to do is clean it and we're good to go on this one so now we can go to the next guitar one thing I want to talk about before I put this the strings on tune it up and put this guitar away is another problem that sometimes happens and I should cover that and that's when a fret comes loose and when a fret comes loose it'll be sticking up and you'll know because there'll be a gap underneath it now usually you can just take a small hammer hammer it back in hopefully it stays if it doesn't stay because the wood has been damaged what you can do is lift that gently lift the fret up put superglue underneath it and then clamp it down and clean up the superglue with acetone and clamp it down and wait for about a minute or two take the clamp off and it should stay in place that does happen every now and then also another thing that can happen is when the frets will actually kind of start sticking out this happens due to the environment changing temperature and moisture so if it gets real hot and dry the neck might shrink this way and when it shrinks that direction these guys can protrude a little bit and kind of want to cut the players hands when that happens you can use a small file to kind of round those edges over or even an emery board and just kind of go down the side of it put a piece of tape or something there to protect the the side of the the fretboard but just gently sanding it or taking a small file and rounding over once again when it comes to fret work I'm not going to be going over any of that here in this video because in the guitar building course I show you how to do a complete fret job how to do all the leveling and everything and it's about two hours long and if I were to add it into this video the the video would be just too long so if you need more information about the the fretting and stuff go to the guitar building course if you haven't already purchased it you can purchase it on the Galvin guitars website on the products page there's currently there's seven videos and there might be some more in the future and it covers pretty much everything you would ever need to know to build your own guitar and to do fret work and to build your own necks and stuff like that and this video is a great complement to those videos and vice versa hopefully you won't have to do much fret work on your setups but if you do those videos do have the information that you're looking for so last but not least we'll be doing my bio caster first set up okay and this has been setting and moisture and temperature has changed dramatically here in San Diego and because of that I'm going to need to do a truss rod adjustment you need to be able to identify when it's a truss rod adjustment or if it's a bad fret now if I'm down here playing now this is out of tune right now but if I'm down here playing like an a you can hear fret bus if I play a bar chord on a see we get fret buzz prep bus on the e if I do an A okay it goes away so as I start moving up the fretboard it goes away which tells me that the which tells me that the neck right here has a slight back bow in it okay so this is this is a jet this is adjusted with a truss rod adjustment okay a simple truss rod adjustment will take that that fret was out and to confirm my suspicions which I'm absolutely positive of if I place my straightedge on the neck it will it it will Teeter so it's going to be moving back and forth like this which is a dead sign that we have a back bow and when I when I hold this perfectly flat up here it's it's straight and then it and it touches the frets and then it goes backward okay so all I have to do is a simple truss rod adjustment and it will take care of that before I just the action which I won't need to but before I do that I have to make sure that my fretboard is straight you always do your truss rod adjustments before you start doing anything else make sure that it's tuned to pitch or close to pitch so the tension on the strings is pretty much what it's supposed to be at and then you match the tension with the fret on the width for the neck with the truss rod to the tension of strings if you drop down let's say you do drop tuning if you do drop tuning what can end up happening is you're reducing the tension on the strings and this can actually cause a slight back bow because the the attention and the truss rod is stronger than that and so it has a tendency to tilt back so make sure that you don't automatically assume that the frets or not level do a truss rod adjustment one of the problems that people have when they're dealing with Floyd Rose trims is a lot of times they'll they'll sit there and they'll they'll get everything tune in tune before they do the locking nut and then as soon as they pushed down on the locking nut soon as they tighten this everything goes sharp okay now that usually happens because they do not have this piece right here okay that's what this piece is for what it does is it lowers the strings to the same height as all of the tuning machines but also what it does is it it forces the strings down onto the nut if this was gone these would be sticking up high and when you end up cranking these down it would actually stretch the strings so the height of this right here is important and it can be adjusted with these two screws and you want it to be at the exact same height as the tuning machines now as far as the nut slot height on something like this you can't go in with a file this is hardened steel you can't go in with a file so the only way that you can make sure that this is the correct height either you know down enough or up enough is either routing out the wood so you can lower it or by putting shims underneath it and you usually will put it like a metal shim and you can put a shim maybe on if it's just this site that's low you can put a shim underneath it here and leave this site normal but if you get if you get fret buzz because this is too low to the fretboard you just unscrew these to lift it up put a couple of shims underneath it crank it back down and that will take care of it the dreaded floyd rose now a lot of people are terrified of these things they hate them because they don't know how to set them up and it's not as come it's not as complicated as people make it out to be the very first thing is the action height is adjusted by the pole pieces so you would raise these up or down and then this would end up raising the bridge up and down just like the tune-o-matic bridge right now it's important that when you do that that these guys are fairly close to being the same you wouldn't want this thing to be tilting like this like extreme because if well you should never have to do that but if you ended up doing that it would kind of Jam this thing and it would kind of lock in and have friction there that is unnecessary and it could make clanking noises so try to get them fairly close to the same height the second thing is your fine tuning is done right here this is where you do all of your fine-tuning you want these to be said about halfway okay do all of your string adjustments and everything along those lines after you have everything perfectly in tune and your intonation is done then you lock down the nut it's going to go slightly out of tune and you use these to fine tune it the saddles are adjusted with the intonation by loosening one of the whatever saddle it is these screws and bringing moving this thing back and forth one of the problems with the Floyd Rose that makes it a little frustrating is you have to loosen the string right so you have to remove the locking nut clamp so that way the string is loosened and then you end up unwinding it and so there's no tension on the string you have to kind of remember exactly where the saddle was pull back on it and then tighten it back down again there are three holes on each saddle which will allow this to have different positions okay so if you have to have this thrown way far forward you would end up taking this screw out and moving it to the very front hole okay if it's somewhere in the middle use the middle hole and if it's something where you have to bring this very far back you the rear hole just like the fender trim that we did earlier the Floyd Rose trim should be level with the body okay it should never look like this okay it should never look like that and it should never be you know all the way back either okay now the way that I have this one set up is it can't really do too many pull-ups because I like having this blocked so every time that I let go of it it goes back into exactly where it's supposed to be in it's in tune and everything like that now if you were going to have this floating which basically means you can do dives and you can pull back it can sit it can still be done fairly easy okay but until the strings have been stretched all the way and they're not going to stretch anymore it's going to be going out of tune alot okay so and that's a number one thing on a lot of these trim systems is people do not stretch their strings and they're saying it's so hard to keep it in to stretch your strings the way that you put the strings in on these is when you get your new string where the ball end is you just snip it off okay and then you put your string in there then you clamp it in now after you have all of this stuff done and you're starting to tune this guy up okay you're starting to get this starting to get this guy in tune you might notice that it'll start coming forward like this okay this means the springs behind this are not strong enough you have to you have to get the the springs and start putting more tension on them by tightening those screws in the back okay and what you can do is put something underneath the floyd thin piece of wood some folded a cardboard it doesn't make a difference you stick something underneath the floyd so it can't go back okay and then you want to tighten you want to over tighten these springs on the rear okay so this is constantly being forced back you you bring all of your strings up to pitch and the spring tension will be more than this the string tension and when after that happens and everything is perfectly in tune you can push this forward take those pieces out set it back down and everything's gonna go sharp okay but then what you do is you slowly start releasing the tension on those Springs until this guy starts becoming level and it's back in tune okay that when that happens you know that the spring tension and the string tension are at an equilibrium and that's the number one problem with people doing floyd rose adjustments they don't know how to adjust the springs now looking at looking at mine i can tell that the spring adjustment i have to release the spring just a little bit and when i say just a little bit we're talking a quarter of a turn on only one of the screws that might be more than enough you don't want to be setting there trying to you know do fifteen turns on the screw and releasing a lot of it just a quarter of a turn test it you know quarter of a turn test it and you keep doing that until you find equilibrium as soon as you find equilibrium you'll never really have to adjust it again as long as you're using the same gauge strings as soon as you change the string gauge the tension changes and when the tension changes the spring tension is going to be out and you're going to have to do maybe a quarter of a turn here or there in order to bring everything back up to normal but all trims should be parallel to the body they should be flat and this one I can't like I said I can tell it's ever so slightly the springs are ever so slightly tight Floyd Rose bridges are set at a 14 inch radius now fourteen inch radius will generally work for 16 inch radius and it will also work for twelve inch radius but sometimes people will put these on guitar that has maybe like a 10 inch radius or maybe they want it to even be more flat for a 16 okay the way that that is done is these get released and you would do this first and underneath these you would put thin metal shims okay thin metal shims underneath each one of these to set the radius the way that you need it usually the two in the middle you don't have to do anything to it's going to be these two out cut outside guys that would be for like a 16 inch radius if it was for a 12 inch radius I'm sorry a 10 inch radius then you would be putting them here here and here but mostly here what you can use for the shim for these guys is simply an aluminum can from a coke bottle that you cut into strips that can fit underneath here and just they're thin enough that it'll give it just a little bit of a lift and if you need to add more you can always add more as long as it's metal you'll be fine when you buy a Floyd Rose bridge it will come with pieces of steel and these pieces of steel that go inside there is specifically for the adjustment of changing the radius if you can set up one guitar like a Fender Strat there is no reason why you can't set up pretty much every single guitar that's out there because the principles are the same nothing really changes maybe the bridge design changes a little bit or than not changes a little bit but ultimately everything is the same so for basic setups and basic troubleshooting this pretty much concludes this video there are some things that happen when you're when you're doing repairs where you start seeing twisted necks and bent necks and you see where maybe the neck that is set that was installed in the wrong spot you know you do find things like that but in this video that would go way beyond this video this video is set and basic troubleshooting that would be guitar repair right unlike extreme cases of that which happens sometimes but it goes beyond the scope of this video so that's that and hopefully you learned something from this and until next time I'm William Galvin and I will talk to you later

Channel: Gelvin Custom Guitars

Views: 492,714

Keywords: how to do perfect guitar setups, guitar setup, how to do a guitar setup, frets, fret leveling, intonation, tune o matic, electric guitar, back bow, fret buzz, how to fix fret buzz, what causes fet buzz, get rid of fret buzz, action height, dead notes, string replacement, how to tune a guitar, how to replace strings, how to set a tremolo, tremolo, floyd rose, luthier

Id: -qT2QS04zaM

Length: 148min 14sec (8894 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 14 2019