Make Your CHEAP Guitar Play Like a MILLION Bucks!

so if you guys ever sat down to play guitar and experienced something a little like this all that fret buzz or perhaps something a little more like this you've got to be kidding me or perhaps you tune up your guitar but you go to play a chord and it's never in tune well thankfully there are solutions to these problems so what we're gonna do today is go through some of the main issues people have with their guitar on the bridge on the neck and on the nut and we're going to try to make your budget guitar play like a million bucks now I always think it's a cool idea for every guitar player to build a guitar kit or maybe pick up a cheap budget guitar used or you know this one was a hundred bucks new something to have a platform on to practice basic skills so that you can learn to set up an instrument with confidence and do some basic maintenance now this particular guitar was made in China sent over to California and then shipped up to me here in Canada now considering we're currently locked into that dreaded polar vortex with temperatures so bone-chilling ly cold that water thrown in the air will instantly freeze like this I've got to say this guitar arrived and has held it set up quite well so within today's video on how to set up a budget guitar so that it doesn't suck and that it plays really well we're gonna break it up into three different components so first of all we're going to tackle the nut and the string trees on cheap and budget guitars this is the culprit for like almost every tuning issue with a budget guitar so it's super essential stuff we're going to talk about how to make this work so that your guitar holds tuned we're going to talk about the overall setup of the neck including the fret ends and then we're gonna talk about setting up your bridge and your action height to the radius of your neck all right you guys let's launch into topic number one which is the nut and the string trees this is super central here we go now as I previously mentioned the nut is one of the most important areas on your instrument and certainly on budget guitars one of the main issues why they don't play well so we have to address this now first of all if the height is not set correctly for your string it's going to cause massive tuning issues and it doesn't matter if you're playing a C or an A or a D it's all gonna sound out of tune even though you know you use your tuner and your strings are all in tune as soon as you go to press down you have to press down so far it would be like you know if the string was like this and you have to press down so far just to you know contact that fret the whole guitar would go out of tune and you'd have to lower the nut slots now when you look here you can see how you know it's just set up beautifully I was so surprised for a budget guitar I barely have to you know press down on those strings and it contacts the frets so this is what you want so if you're you know you have to press down really hard then you're gonna have to deepen your nut slot which we'll talk about in a second now step one is simply to loosen your strings off so that they come out of the slots very easily so we don't want to do that under tension because you can't actually break the corner of a nut off and you know replacing them is relatively easy and cheap I've done it in other videos I'll link to it above right now if you want to see how to replace and not but here we're talking about maintenance and just you know kind of keeping it budget so first of all there's a couple things that you can do that don't cost a lot of money to polish the nut slots now the easiest one is simply just to take old strings so here we've got a couple like d'addario strings they're color coded so you'd know exactly which string goes in which slot so simple and easy to do now we don't want a low like lower the slot at all but all you want to do is kind of floss it okay and again the front edge is where the string contacts so you want to go at a bit of an angle okay just like this I just floss it kind of back and forward and then take a good look and make sure there's no burrs there's no sections that are you know causing the string to hang up so that's the cheapest and easiest way keep it at an angle like this and again on this guitar I don't want to go deeper so I'm not using a lot of downward pressure okay so that's the easiest and cheapest way and then you would just go to fifth string which is you know the red nubby do the same thing just floss it back and forward cheap easy and it's going to make a huge difference secondly you could just buy some specific tools these are really inexpensive quote-unquote nut files from Amazon they're in my profile under Daryl's gear if you want to find out more than about these but they're super cheap you could never really cut nut slots with these so even though they're called files they're not really but anyway they have a bunch of different stink string gauges which makes it really easy so you can just pick the appropriate gauge again keep that angle because we don't want to you know adjust this and they just have you know lightly filed edges so you can just move it through until it feels totally smooth and away you go and then just pick the appropriate gauge works really slick and it's inexpensive so that's all it takes to polish up the nut slots after that you want to lubricate with some pencil graphite so if you don't want to spend a bunch of money just use old strings like I showed you flossing back and forth use a pencil done that's gonna be awesome now that being said the best product I've found you know to go beyond pencil graphite which you have to reapply quite often is the super V so this stuff works really well it's goopy but it works awesome so I'll show you guys how that works this is just Super Glide nut evolution from super V com not affiliated with these guys at all it just works really well so anyway here's what we're gonna do alright so good to have a paper towel on hand you can just use a toothpick lightly dip some of the goop in and just paint it in now this stuff hardens up to like an insane smooth surface so it works awesome now it takes like you know maybe a couple hours before it really does that but anyway you could just sort of paint it in put your string in and then move on so this stuff works amazingly well so if you're having like persistent trouble clean it up after after I'm done but anyway yeah if you're having persistent trouble with tuning this stuff works amazing now the next area of concern is of course the string trees it's another friction point right so basically the function of the string tree is to keep downward pressure of the string on the nut if there's not enough downward pressure you get sort of that zingy sitar II kind of sound which we do want to avoid but here they're really unnecessary I don't know if it'll show up on camera but fifth string here has a really nice break angle basically straight from the nut down to the tuning machine no you know crazy cranking down now you know 4th 3rd 2nd and 1st really quite bad and I don't think we need that much downward pressure on the nut you know if there is a perfect design it's the musicman design where you know there's no string trees there's no tilt back and you know the strings can just easily be pulled out of the knot at any time there's so little downward pressure on a Music Man and the sustain is great the tone is great and the tuning spits the tuning stability is pretty much you know unparalleled they're just amazing amazing guitars with a beautiful design so enemy that being said what we're gonna do is remove one of our string trees because we don't need it so we're going to take the top one and just pull it off and again well if you want to try this then you do want to test out your guitar to make sure you're not getting you know any of that sitar motion and what we're going to do is take first string and we're going to keep a string tree but not this one what we're gonna do is swap them because they're different heights and I don't want this super low one these are really easy to strip again so I'm gonna have to be really careful to keep downward pressure there there we go cheap guitars all the hardware's you know prone to prone to stripping and then what I'm going to do is take the one that was holding fourth string and third string down and install it here on first and second so again it won't crank the strings down excuse me quite as far there we go and done so we've eliminated one friction point here and then we've raised the string tree up here on first and second string that should help a ton so there you go a little dab of wood filler right here and you'll never notice anything was there and of course we'll do a little playing test for you guys at the end so you'll hear what this sounds like all right so that's setup tip number one I wanted to cover that one first because it can be absolutely so frustrating and a massive turnoff for new players if they get this awesome guitar they're so excited to learn and it just doesn't hold tune this is something easy that anybody can do so anyway hopefully you guys found that helpful alright so let's move on to concept two for making your budget guitar play like a dream so we're gonna move down the neck we've done the nut and the string trees that's all good yeah we're gonna tackle sort of sharp and protruding Fred ends that can really plague budget guitars and and even more expensive guitars and if you hang your thumb over or you slide back and forth it becomes really uncomfortable so I tackled this issue in a separate video so I'm just going to kind of like breeze by it quickly but a link to the full one above now if you're a new player and you're curious what high-end beautiful fretwork looks like this is the fret work on my Ibanez absolutely beautiful so you can see how the fret ends are beautifully rounded on both sides so that if your finger kind of passes over one way or the other way totally smooth all the way up the neck and this takes a lot of man-hours which is you know why it's not found on a lot of guitars but anyway beautiful beautiful fret work all the way up and down the neck of this Ibanez and you can see the fretboard is rolled a little bit so very very comfortable to slide to move it just helps you get around the neck you know easily and comfortably so let's take a look at our budget guitar all right now here's a look at our budget guitar so as you guys can see hopefully there are like little tooling marks on the edges like the files where they went by and kind of like shaped the frets now they're not sharp in any way but we just want to smooth those out for a better experience now the second thing you'll notice is the fretboard ends are like rolled amazing so they're just like no sharp edges beautiful from that standpoint but the fret ends themselves could use a little polishing so to polish up the fret ends all we're going to use is this cheap Home Depot eBay Amazon foam sanding block sometimes called a sanding sponge and what we're gonna do is take this one's like four sided we're just gonna take the light green side because we're not sanding we are just polishing okay so no downward pressure and what you want to do is take the angle of the fret ends so look at the angle of the Fed ends this will span at least three frets so it should keep you right on track and then all you want to do is float it back and forth so like I said no downward pressure or polishing or not sanding and what this is gonna do is just take some of that edges off both sides and take the tooling marks out of the frets okay take that little fuzz off there okay so that's all you have to do I would do like maybe I don't know 10 to 15 passes again no downward pressure and then check it check on air Fred ends and go from there now after using the sanding block I went over the fret ends with a little steel wool just to shine them up and now you can see all the ends are a little bit more rounded most of the tooling marks are gone and they just feel absolutely fantastic so no special tools five minutes and you've just got like a pro playing neck okay so we've got our tuning issues solved at the nut hopefully we'll do a playing test at the end just to see you know do a bunch of bands and stuff see if it holds tuned we've got beautiful Fred ends all the way up and down the neck feels absolutely beautiful it came with a satin finish so feels really great to play on now what we want to tackle is the string action so if your string action is too low you're going to get a bunch of that fret buzz and if it's too high it's gonna be unplayable and put your guitar to tune as you press down on the fret so this is very important so step one to setting your action is making sure your neck is straight now to help verify if my neck is straight or not I have a straight edge tool which really makes things easy all you have to do there's not just for the frets one side is for twenty-five and a half the other side is for 24 and 3/4 and you can quickly look and verify if your neck is straight now as I mentioned previously when I first got this guitar I don't know if I'll be able to show you guys but anyway where there's no moisture in the air it's polar vortex City and the neck has maned straight over the week so it came from California and China before that so I'm impressed you know considering it came up to Canada here in the coldest of the cold the neck has not moved over the week at all so there you go pretty impressed with that now that being said if you don't have a straightedge to verify if your neck is straight or not there's a trick that you can use so what we're gonna do is capo our guitar on first fret and we're going to use the strings as our straightedge then what you want to do is press down where the neck meets the body okay so what we're going to do then is use your string as a straight edge and then you can go up and down your frets and just see how much relief there is on the neck if there's not much relief and it's pretty straight then all the strings should be about equal as you play it up and down your neck so I'll take a closer shot to show you guys what I mean all right this is seventh fret and this is ninth fret so it's kind of in the middle of our guitar and here you can see there's just a little bit of relief and it stays pretty much consistent right through the middle so this would let you know that your neck is straight now if your string was like way off the neck like this then you would know there's too much relief and we need to straighten it out and if it was like contacting the fret then you would know your neck was bowed and you needed to loosen the truss rod now at this point if you had too much relief and you wanted to straighten your neck out all you do is you turn your truss rod clockwise okay that's gonna tighten it up and straighten out your neck now if you're getting way too much fret buzz and you need it a little bit more relief you would take it and loosen the truss rod off by turning it counterclockwise now well certainly there's no mystery to adjusting your truss rod you do have to be careful if you have too much resistance you don't want to just power through and crank it because you can strip it or even break it it is just a threaded metal rod that goes down the center of your neck so if you have a bunch of resistance don't just power through just stop loosen it and just get a feel for it it is an essential skill for everybody to have because your neck is going to move you know come wintertime and then you know come spring so different humidity in the air different temperature the next just going to move so I would say with the chief guitar experiment with it but if you you know run into a lot of pressure then just back off and don't just you know crank the rod and strip the end so here's a quick look on how I set up my action so on strat style guitars they tend to be sort of like medium high ish I just find it sounds a little bit better the notes don't choke out and and they just sustain a little bit better so I don't have the actual gauges to measure for you guys but I would imagine it's close to fender specs on like a PRS or and Ibanez they might be a little bit lower but for this style of guitar I find this is a perfect combination to eliminate fret buzz while still being really playable now before we do our intonation which is the absolute last step of our setup we don't want to set our intonation and then move a bunch of stuff because it's just going to go out so that's gonna be our last step so what we're gonna do next is radius the saddles again this is super important to have the same radius on your saddles as you do on the neck because again it affects playability and fret buzz if you don't have that set up correctly now while radius gauges are certainly not mandatory for this step you can just eyeball it they do come in handy so I can verify that the radius on this guitar is 12 and that's going to help us set up our saddles so let's jump over to the saddles now when we look at our bridge there's a couple things to consider first of all the adjustment feet are way too tall so I need some shorter ones you can order shorter ones because this is just gonna like poke my hand and we just don't need that height so that's the first thing so in the future I think we should replace those but when it comes to radius you can just slide them under the strings like so and here you know I can definitely rock it back and forth which means these Center ones need to come up a little bit higher my sixth string and my first string or okay now on block saddles it's easier just to even set them on the saddles themselves but a little trickier on the bend steel but hopefully you guys can see there's a gap between the Center ones so we're gonna start by raising third string and fourth string now once you verify the height you should loosen the tension off the strings it's going to make adjusting the saddle a lot easier and you know remove any chance of stripping these out all right I think we're getting close there's really no rocking other than movement of this string so I think we're pretty close and verify on the saddles here yeah that looks much much closer so I think we're pretty good let's move on all right hopefully you haven't been finding this too daunting if you just go slowly and step by step take your time it's amazing what you can do to a budget guitar and just because it isn't playing well or you know it's got a lot of fret buzz the strings are too high all those are solvable problems and it doesn't mean your guitar is garbage it just means likely it wasn't set up well and the final step is setting the intonation and this is something that you should check on every guitar whether you pick it up used or new it oftentimes needs to be tweaked and how you set your intonation is by sliding the saddles forward or backward okay and that's going to equalize the tuning between the nut all the way up to the higher frets so if you notice you're kind of like going out of tune up around 12th fret or past 12th fret likely your intonation needs to be tweaked so as long as you know the action is where you want it and you've got good tuning stability and playability is good the neck is straight tension is on the strings then we can set our intonation now to set our intonation we really need two things we need a screwdriver that we can use to move the saddle forward or backward and we need a tuner on the headstock so what we're going to do is just verify that the guitar itself is in tune there we go and then what you want to do is lightly press on the twelfth fret and check out the tuning now in this case it is way way way way sharp so we need to lengthen the string so we're gonna take the saddle and suck it all the way back now to do that we should lower the tension on the string so I'm gonna make it floppy here we go and then we just take our screwdriver and carefully even if though it's a budget guitar we still you know want to be careful so we're gonna take this saddle and like crank or back because it was quite sharp now once we have it back what you have to do is tune up again [Music] now it's still showing a little bit sharp on the 12th fret so what I'm gonna do is take the saddle and move it all the way back pretty much as far back as we can go now to check your intonation what you do is you hit the open string make sure it's perfectly in tune and then play up on twelfth fret and they both should be in tune so from E to E now not one I could move a little bit well it's close I can maybe move it back a little bit more I do have a lot of room on that saddle so I'll just do it quickly now here for you guys I'll just crank it back a few turns should be sharp there we go now if it's sharp up on twelfth fret you need to move your saddle back and if it's flat you need to move it forward that's a little better I think okay and then second string that one's looking pretty good there's strings okay fourth string up on twelfth looking good it's a up one twelve and our last one E and then on twelve so still a touch sharp on there the spring is pretty much or the saddles pretty much as far back as they can go I could like cut that spring in half because there is room but the spring is compressed so if I took that off I think I could get that saddle back a little bit further just by putting in like a smaller spring but I think for now we're just gonna live with it all right you guys that completes our full set up this thing should be playing like an absolute dream right now let's do the fun stuff let's plug it in and take it for a spin [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] thanks so much for watching you guys this really is the wrap-up of buying a budget guitar modding it for cheap and then setting it up so that it plays like a high dollar guitar I hope you guys enjoyed this series if you did be sure to subscribe to the channel by clicking right here the rest of my information the tab store or the t-shirt store all that stuff will be on the screen or in the video description below have an awesome week you guys take care

Channel: Darrell Braun Guitar

Views: 2,325,468

Rating: 4.9392896 out of 5

Keywords: squier stratocaster, squier, squier jazzmaster, squier deluxe stratocaster, squier classic vibe, squier vs fender, squier strat vs mexican strat, squier stratocaster vs ameican stratocaster, squier classic vibe vs fender, squier classic vibe telecaster, squier classic vibe stratocaster, stratocaster vs telecaster, darrell braun, modding a squier, guitar modifications, partscaster guitar, electic guitar, How to set up a guitar, guitar setup

Id: k8ZpTWPnJ20

Length: 23min 7sec (1387 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 08 2019