Making a Guitar Nut - 3 Tips for Proper Slotting

today we're working on the guitar nut and making a nut for the skips in j200 and i want to point out a few things about making a nut while i'm doing it it's very important of course that you get the strings spaced properly across the width of the nut and to the right depth not too low where buzz on the fret not too high where it would be just too hard to play you want the string to take off at the front of the slot of the nut and meet at a peak at the saddle these two points control whether the intonation will be proper to ensure that you get that you need to do as much work on the back side of that nut as you do at the front and that's what we're going to talk about today the first thing when making a nut is to round it so the back slopes downward like this i grabbed three nut blanks off the shelf these are pre-shaped and pre-slotted this is a martin it's the widest it gives the most meat to round off here's the gibson at least the way it starts out it's rounded but not in such a steep fashion any hard edges are rounded off then the fender they don't have a lot of width to do any rounding but they do put it at an angle the slight back angle that's the angle you're going to be filing at anyway when you're making a nut from scratch starting with the blank there's three things to think about when you're cutting those slots one important thing first would be the right depth the second thing is what goes on behind the string on the back side of the nut it has to be back filed downward at a gentle angle towards the tuning keys so that the string is free to take off at the front of the nut in this picture the slots might be at the right depth but they're just flat straight across that's not what you want there's no takeoff point at the front the string must gradually be backfiled going downhill towards the back of the nut but not a sharp angle like this there's no meat to support to take off that would wear out in days to get the right shape we round the slot in a gradual slope like this it leaves a lot of material to support the string guaranteeing that it will vibrate from the front of the nut and still have enough material to prevent it from wearing down too fast and the third thing which is pretty much the point of this lesson on the back side of the nut when the string is coming through that sharp slot you want to open the back edges of the slot up it's like coming down a mountain into a valley you don't want to kink when that g string and d string comes off the sharp bone nut you want to help it head towards this tuner okay now we're going to see how to do this job it's not going to take a long time it's a subtle thing not a big thing and i have got the string height in this nut right where i want it i've also taken all the extra meat off the top of this nut because it started out as a blank and i worked my way down and now each string is sitting in about half of its diameter in the slot that's plenty to hold it so one at a time i'm going to go through this and open them up give them the valley so i'm going to start with the d string because it's easy to see it's a good demo there it's also one of the slots that has the most kink to a string see how it comes out and it's a little kinked i'm going to move that over a little bit open up that valley so to speak i'm going to put a little pencil on that i'm sliding this low tack tape underneath the strings just for a little protection today i'm going to use a new file that i'm raving about their killer these are diamond plated nut files what i love about these files they're round on the bottom really smoothly plated with this diamond it's not like having a tooth file a tooth file can skid especially like on a twinomatic gibson bridge with the chrome plated saddle and you have to cut the notch when it slips off these don't because they don't have teeth to run you off gonna just kiss this little valley that i'm gonna go for it's almost like you're imagining the strings flowing to that side and you leave it i've opened this up here a little bit just opened it up leans a little bit towards that side to make sure there's no burrs on it it's hard to see it once you clean it and sand it up you'll see it easier but now the string is going to tend to not have a big kink as it goes over gentle little curve you can see it you don't need hardly anything on the a string on the low e not much it's just that clean up g-string just a little bit on the downside that careful slanting of this to just the right spot i think is responsible for good dentination and good sound now i need that little black pencil dust will clean up when i knock this down to shape the back edge is going to get rounded more and polished that's it it's just a little bit of knowledge that you might not have had it's a little thing but it's all the little things that add up to have that ramp or valley and open up that string so it can speak it's worth it that's a part of making it not if you like 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Channel: StewMac

Views: 183,527

Keywords: guitar nut filing, guitar nut, guitar nut repair, guitar nut adjustment, guitar nut width, guitar repair, guitar repair videos, guitar repair acoustic, stewmac, stewmac nut, stewart macdonald, dan erlewine, guitar setup, guitar setup tutorial, acoustic guitar setup, acoustic guitar setup tutorial, acoustic guitar nut setup, nut slots, filing guitar nut slots, guitar, acoustic guitar, luthier, luthier tools, lutherie, luthiery, guitar life, guitar life hacks, guitar hacks

Id: fruFJxmWe5I

Length: 4min 59sec (299 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020