How To tell If Your Acoustic Guitar Is Any Good

hey guys today I'm going to be doing how to inspect an acoustic guitar this series has been going over very well I did a how to inspect the Gibson Les Paul and how to inspect the Fender Stratocaster if you have a suggestion for a guitar you would like to see me do a how-to inspect on just put the suggestion down below in the comments to inspect an acoustic guitar all you're going to need is a couple things down below is a free PDF that you can download and print and it will give you all the information I'm going to cover in this video you might want a mirror or some kind of way to look inside the sound hole of an acoustic in most cases a flashlight in a mirror I'll put a link to the mirror down below in case you're looking for that and the flashlight but if you don't have a mirror and a flashlight you can use your cell phone and I'll show you that as well so let's talk about what we need to do when you're inspecting an acoustic guitar first thing I look at on the guitar since I'm starting here is the nut and what the material is this is a arts and lutherie guitar it's made in Canada and this actually has a graphtec nut this is a tusk nut by graphtec and I can tell that because graphtec especially it Browns when it gets sun damaged well we're not it just turns brown and it's one of the few materials that do that plastic nuts won't um won't turn they'll yellow almost like how bone will but it's really an artificial looking yellow like said tusk will always have this very consistent tan color like you see in their packaging but you definitely can tell without even have to do anything else if it looks like it's brown on the top it's suntan so it actually tans it's weird I don't know what's in the material that does that but if you get any Sun on your your tusk material it's going to brown over and we want to make sure that the slots are cut correctly so what you can do is you can use a capo to capo the third fret or use your ring finger push down on the third fret and use your pointer finger to push down on the first fret and what I like to see is a little gap about the thickness of a sheet of paper so you can actually use this paper it's perfect for me keep in mind the higher it is the more you're going to probably have an intonation issue when you're doing chords or it's gonna be really hard to do those kind of barred chords like the F chord so check that and you go you can go through each string and check each one and it's just a fast quick way to see if the nut slots are cut correctly we're gonna look to see if it's been repaired now this is something we'll look throughout the guitar to see but in this case we're gonna look to see if maybe the headstock had been broken off and fixed and we're looking for hairline cracks now keep in mind if it hasn't been fixed we want to make sure that it's not gonna need a fix and so the same thing we're looking for hairline cracks around the where the nut is and where the headstock and the the shaft of the neck is connected whether it's one piece or not two pieces it doesn't matter look for that damage also real common with acoustic guitars is sometimes in the tuning key right here there's a hairline crack because it was hit and damaged and cracked from the hole that was made from the screw again you have to decide what of these issues are going to stop you from making the purchase or concern you to take to repair but I just want to show you how to find these things next thing we want to look for is loose tuning machines again this isn't to disqualify a purchase this is just to see what assessment the guitar needs a lot of times the nut has loose on the tuning key and so we want to make sure those get tightened and you want to make sure that there's no movement in the tuning keys and again that's gonna help with tuning stability because obviously you don't want them shifting while you're tuning now we want to check to make sure the neck is straight now this is where there's a little controversy some people are like the next should be dead straight some people say there should be a little relief the reality is is that some guitars are going to need a little relief which is just the neck having a little a little bit of a forward bow in it some are gonna be dead straight it really depends on the type of guitar and what's going on generally speaking again generally speaking I like the neck on acoustic guitar to have just a little bit of relief now we want to check for frets Prout that's super easy just run your fingers along the sides of the frets the width of the neck if you feel like something is scratching or cutting your fingers that means the frets are sticking out that is because the neck has shrank the frets didn't grow their metal they stay the same width but however when the frets were cut to the width of the neck the neck may have shrank and again that's something can be easily done I have a video down below that you can click that shows you what you need to do to correct that or you can have a tech correct it be their way you just be aware it's something that has to be addressed now now we want to check the neck joint and we want to look for any kind of cracks or or gaps in the joint and the tolerance of this is zero which means we don't want any gaps or or cracks if there's a crack it could because the next glued and now it's been separated and that's a problem that has to be fixed now if there's a gap it could because the next bolted on a lot of Coos guitar decks are actually bolted on and the bolts get loose from the vibration and essentially now the neck is being pulled forward that something has to be again tightened and addressed immediately we want to check to make sure the neck doesn't have a twist in the neck that's super easy we're gonna site the acoustic I like to hold it from the body and look down the neck using the high E string you can see that that's perfectly flat and straight we're gonna see how close the frets run exactly along that line and you can do it on the other side too now a twist in the neck what would happen is you would notice that one side of the neck has a bigger gap between the neck and the string than the other side you could also check a twist the neck coming at the guitar this way in other words holding the body like this and holding the headstock firm don't put any pressure on the headstock and sight it this way however that's not my preferred method with an acoustic guitar but sometimes I like to do both sides just to be thorough now we want to check to make sure the guitar does not have any dead notes dead notes is when we individually pluck each note and find a string or note that frets out now on acoustic guitars there's this thing that I like to call the 12th fret hump in other words around the 12th fret to the base of the neck where it starts sometimes the net and the notes go dead and that's because the fretboard has kind of been pushed up and it's a little high and you get a lot of dead notes this guitar [Music] this guitar does not suffer from that but if it does that's another thing that has to be addressed and again that can be addressed pretty easily with a crown and level but you need to be aware that the guitar is going to need that now we want to check the truss rod for damage that's something that now this is what we would use the mirror and the flashlight for most the time the truss rod for the acoustic is going to be at the base of the neck inside the sound hole so you can go ahead with your mirror and look in there and you can now turn and see this is much easier than citing it this way for me but if you find it works that way sometimes you can just reach in there now on normally I'd have this guitar on a bench so I could use my both hands one for the flashlight and one for the mirror if you don't have a mirror and a flashlight you can take your phone what I like to do turn on the phone turn on the camera stick the phone inside the sound hole and record what it sees in there pull it out and then visually look at the recording kind of like how a plumber would run a scope down a pipe now we want to look for divots and the frets or fret where in other words where there's wear spots and the frets that's a big deal again those things are a sign that the guitars been played heavily and you might need a crown and level or a reef Rhett that would have to be decided by how much material is left on the frets if the normal fret on acoustic guitar you'll get about three crown levels out of it after that it gets really low and a lot of players will enjoy it it'll feel like a much different guitar at that point on the PDF there's a part where you can mark all the issues you found on the frets now the thing I want to look at the most is what I call the bubble in the top what I do is I site the top of the acoustic guitar you want the gusta guitar to be flat it's called a flat top acoustic for a reason ideally perfectly flat is ideal keep in mind that a lot of acoustics are not going to be flat well not only do I visually look at I like to run my fingers across it like this and sometimes I can feel a little bump in the the top and the bump will be right behind the bridge right here you'll see it be lifting up that's a problem for two reasons one if this continues to bubble the bridge can't flex because it's too thick and it will separate from the body and the two-piece top which usually has a seam down the center can crack so if you see bubbling on the top it doesn't mean the guitars bad yet and we need to do the next step so now what we would do is again we would get out our mirror or phone and go inside and now what we're gonna look for is we're gonna look at the bracing and this is a good way to see if any of the bracing has come free on the gusta guitar this is very important you're looking for any bracing that looks like it may have separated from the top are missing entirely so just because all the bracings intact don't assume that everything's fine go ahead and look and make sure that there's no glue marks where a brace could have been it may have broke off and somebody took it out of the guitar and throwing it away or I mean fell out know something because somebody to know what it was why is that important well here's what you have to understand this bridge right here is glued on to the top of the guitar at the top of this this thin piece of wood right here and all the strings are pulling on this bridge so underneath here is a bunch of bracing sometimes a cross sometimes an X pattern there's all kinds of ways to do the bracing but more importantly the bracing is really holding this guitar together so it can take all the tension that's happening from these strings if one of the braces shrinks and breaks off or separates because the glue dries out or just impact damage what will happen is the force of the strings will be pulling on the top and that top will flex a lot more than it would have if it had bracing causing all those issues I talked about before which is a bridge separation the top cracking and other problems now that we decided the guitars okay we're gonna go ahead and check the saddle that's on top of the bridge this piece the dark piece of wood is the bridge the thin piece which is sometimes made a bone this is actually made a tusk like we said before it this has been tanned from the Sun and sometimes the materials plastic and of course graphite so what we want to look at is to make sure that there's no chips in it and that there's no issues with it there's no cracks in it and it makes sure it's fine the other thing you want to make sure is that it's tall if it looks like it's flat in other words it looks like it's right up against the bridge and there's the saddle is very low there's no clearance that's bad because a lot of times to fix guitars like this like action whether the action is too high or if the top starts to bubble just a little bit which again not enough to royal damage the guitar but just over time it's flexing just a hair you may want to sand that saddle down too kind of set the guitar back to his position if it's already as low as it can get you're you're kind of out of room right you don't want to be in that situation you want to be a situation where you can always go ahead and sand the bridge down now remember you could always add a taller bridge or add height or shim the bridge up but more importantly you want to make sure that you can actually stand this bridge down it's a very easy process for most people and if you can't stand this bridge down you're gonna run into trouble later now this guitar doesn't have electronics but we're gonna go ahead and talk about electronics the first thing you want to do when you plug in the guitar to an amplifier is check the controls make sure that they're not scratchy so if you have potentiometers turn them if you have sliders slide them if you hear any scratching you need to use some dioxide or some component cleaner and clean that out the next thing you want to check is the output Jack make sure it's tight they get really loose and they can get twist and break the two wires inside can be twisted and break off all kinds issues tighten that down and also make sure that it's thoroughly working and giving you a solid connection now the trickier part is the saddle you want to make sure when you plug it into an amplifier that you pluck not all the strings but each string individually comparing to the volume to the last string if you hear one of the strings is quieter than the others you might have an issue with your transducer underneath your saddle so that's something that you can fix easily you can remove the saddle check the transducer to make sure it's working properly by tapping on it lightly across all the way across to make sure it's working and if it's working fine the odds are the saddle is not all the way down pushed against it which means somebody put it together and restrung it maybe the saddle came loose and didn't line up correctly again so again you can just fix that by restringing it or the saddle itself somebody maybe you've sanded it and it's not perfectly flat the bottom of the saddle needs to be perfectly flat especially when dealing with a transducer pickup all right so that's how I inspect acoustic guitar I hope you enjoyed this video if you did don't forget to check out the others in this series or other videos on this channel if you like this video go ahead and give it a thumbs up don't forget if you'd like to see more content like this you really subscribe and hit the bell notification so that you can be notified when the next video comes up and until the next time I want to thank you so much for your time and/or your gear

Channel: Phillip McKnight

Views: 183,578

Rating: 4.9439836 out of 5

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Id: SpA9QvxMrFk

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 12 2019