The Complete DIY Guitar Setup Tutorial

the local guitar setup person hates him for this one simple trick well it's actually a bunch of simple tricks that's right I'm gonna show you a variety of different ways to adjust and maintain your guitar so it plays better than it ever has before all these adjustments and maintenance tips can be done by you at your house with some basic tools and products I'll link everything I use in the description of this video in case you're interested in buying it and supporting the channel I encourage you to ask questions or share your own maintenance tips in the comments section down below in case there's anything that I missed in this video this video is gonna have it all how to clean your guitar properly how to adjust your truss rod your action your pickup height why would you ought to do that and what would it do if you did do it the intonation of your guitar none of these things are scary I promise they're all very simple and easy to do once you just learn how the first thing you want to think about on your guitar is is anything loose does it need tightening this knob is a little loose it's been bothering me this is a neat little tool designed specifically to remove guitar knobs just click it in under the knob so it's actually this little washer that needs tightening you can do it with your finger puppet and you also may need to tighten things like your tuning pegs with a string peg nuts okay so chances are you've never done what I'm about to show you to your guitar this is a probe pick it's kind of like a dental tool I guess if you've never done this to your guitar which chances are you haven't it may be a little disturbing let's go right up against your fret and pull out many many hours of grime Oh oh my goodness now that that's over we can actually polish the fret these are Stu Mac fret erasers you would start the bead lowest grit 180 grit and then move up to the finest grit which is a thousand this is a little brush to brush off the particles that you will be polishing out and these go over the frets depending on what size fret you're mainly going to be using this one [Music] after your frets are all polish you can shine them up with this from music nomads and it just puts the little cherry on top this is the fretboard conditioner that I like these days but hold on before you go crazy if you have a maple neck that's finished don't do that these sorts of necks do not need that sort of treatment [Music] of course don't forget to lubricate your nut with some slick nuts [Music] this is great for if your neck gets a little cloudy maybe you're in a humid environment this is awesome to keep that neck nice and smooth [Music] this is some great stuff to use if you're noticing any crackling in your volume or tone pots or your pickup selector is crackling this is the instrument polish that I like [Music] now it comes to changing strings most of my guitars have locking tuners we can simply feed the string through the tuning peg and you are good to go when you lock it up but if your guitar has standard tuning pegs this is how I like to wrap the strings I'll just put the string through and make sure to wrap over top of the string first as it comes back around we will wrap under creating this little string sandwich that keeps the string perfectly in place as you tighten it these next few adjustments are going to be made in playing position so put the guitar on your lap how you would when you're playing it and we are gonna start with adjusting the truss rod now I know what you're thinking truss rod my necks gonna snap this is too dangerous trust me it is not scary whatsoever the truss rod adjustment is actually one of the easiest and most effective adjustments to make when you're setting up your guitar here's how we do it so you want your guitar neck to be completely straight as an arrow completely flat so you check if you need to adjust your truss rod you'll fret this first fret and then you'll come down here and fret the last fret and then we do this little move here which is checking how much space is in between the fretboard and the string you'll want this little bounce on your pinky first finger on the first fret of the e-string finger on the very last fret of that same thick east ring and then use your pinky to check the bounce and too much bounce means an adjustment of the truss rod to tighten it not enough bounce means to give it some relief you don't see any space whatsoever and the string is kind of against the fret board then you have back bow which means the truss rod is pulling the headstock backwards and needs relief if you see a pretty big space in between the string and the fret board then you have front bow which means you need to tighten the truss rod I would say this guitar is pretty good but I actually adjusted the truss rod just to demonstrate this so we actually have a little bit of front bow going I'm going to show you how to make this adjustment very simply most guitars come with a truss rod adjustment tool to add relief or loosen the truss rod you'll push the tool forward to tighten the truss rod pull the tool toward you looks perfect to me and it should bring true now we're gonna take a look at the action we are going to need a machinist ruler which uses 32nd of an inch measurements and for the high e-string you'll want about 2 30 seconds for the low e-string we wanted to be about two and a half thirty seconds which if I check here it looks to be about three so this is high I want to pull this action down a little bit you'll do that by actually loosening the respective screws on the saddle and you'll see that it starts to bring the action of the string down perfect now we come to adjusting your pickup height chances are you don't really have to do this it's more of a tinkering thing than anything else the pickup height is going to affect tone and overall output so pickups are little microphones the further away your pickup is from the string the less output you're going to receive but also a little bit warmer tone may be the result if the pickups are higher or closer to the strings you're gonna have a louder output but you're going to also have maybe have a little bit of an abrasive sound especially in each pickups frequency range so like if your treble pickup was really close to your strings then you're gonna have a really biting edgy sound which some people like contrast that with the bass pickup with the bass pickups real close to the strings you're gonna have a big boomy sound which can be good but I generally like to be straight down the middle when it comes to pickup height I generally leave it with the manufacturer and don't really have to push it too far out of the way just depending on if you had to adjust your action and maybe your pickups are getting in the way you can push them down a little bit but generally the rule of thumb is between two and three thirty seconds on your machinist ruler between all the pickups just set them there and then adjust accordingly based on your ear so here's the final tip I have for you in this video and this is the last thing you want to do when you are adjusting your guitar setup and that is the intonation so what we're gonna do is first a little trick that I picked up somewhere along the way I think I actually picked this up when I was touring the PRS Factory we're gonna turn our tone knob down to about halfway and we're gonna put our pickup selection on the neck pickup and what this does is essentially dole the overtones in your guitar signal so if you've ever had a tuner that kind of like bounces around then this is gonna take care of that problem you're getting rid of all those juicy saturated overtones and frequencies and pulling them out of the signal just for a moment while we get the intonation the tuning correct and by the way we are gonna want to plug into an actual physical tuner you don't want to be using one of the headstock tuners those just aren't quite as accurate especially when we're doing something as delicate as an intonation set so what we're gonna do is play an a string for example and we're gonna get that perfectly in tune first and then with our playing grip meaning you want to actually fret the note how you would play it because that's how you want it to be in tune you don't want to press too hard or not hard enough and then when you actually play the guitar like you would naturally won't be properly in turn ated so with our playing grip we're gonna fret the 12th fret of the a and well looks like we're perfectly intimated let's find one that's not intimated how about the E string cut the e perfectly in fret the 12th fret and well maybe this guitar is a bad example let's try the D string [Music] twelve fret there we go all right so this is a little bit sharp so what we want to do is take our screwdriver and loosen that saddle and just a small turns all we need for that amount so as we can see went a little too far [Music] perfect and we're gonna want to tune that back up a little bit now this should be perfectly in tune make that adjustment to all six strings whichever ones need it and you are intimated well there you have it my friends a bunch of adjustments in maintenance tips from me to you it's like you have a brand new instrument isn't that nice until next time keep shred [Music] [Music]

Channel: Music is Win

Views: 1,051,193

Keywords: guitar cleaning, how to clean a guitar, clean a guitar properly, how to clean a guitar body, clean guitar without damaging, guitar cleaning tips, guitar neck polish, guitar polish, best guitar cleaners, lemon oil guitar, lemon oil guitar neck, how to clean a rosewood guitar neck, is lemon oil safe for guitar neck, how to set up a guitar, diy guitar setup, how to set guitar action, how to adjust truss rod, how to adjust intonation guitar, guitar intonation tips

Id: SxmgZBzny1w

Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2020