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After last year's failed attempts at glueing up a bridge and a broken headstock, during these rainy months of July to October, here in North India, I had vowed never to attempt any glue-up job during these months. In fact, I had returned a number of repairs asking them to be addressed elsewhere, or else, to be brought back after October. As June was ending, this young man, a return customer brought in his guitar which had this for a problem This is the bass side of the guitar, while the treble side was fixed solid to the top. The ...

A return customer brought in his two Sire guitars with the same problem: string buzz. All through March-end till now, I have had to deal with this problem. Many times, the dryness of the wood makes the fretwires stand, and a strategic tap is all that is needed to seat them back in place. At other times, you can tap all you want, but the fretwires will not seat. In that case, they have to be filed, recrowned and polished. In earlier posts, I have explained what a pain it is levelling fretwires: for when you file fretwires, you do ...

PREFACE: This blogpost comes to you a day late - for no fault of mine. Saturday night, as I was giving finishing touches to the post, this website stopped responding. In response to my SOS, the website hosting this site, got back to me on Sunday afternoon, worked through the day to find the fault and rectify it. The good news is that your favourite guitar site is up and running again. Last week I left you at the point where I measured the length of the slot in the bridge to select a proper saddle. After I selected an ...

Once every four score and some repair jobs comes a challenge that tests your patience as much as your abilities. What pushed me to take it on was the fact that it brought back memories of my own first guitar, how I lost it, and how it all gave rise to the Lucknow Guitar Garage. The job was so painstakingly laborious and slow that I have decided to divide it into two parts. The young man who brought me the instrument was himself very talented and accomplished. He wished for his 'first love' to breathe again, and as that storm ...

I have written about this earlier too, but never actually dedicated a post to it. So, I decided to do so now and explain to my younger readers what all the brouhaha is all about. So, the first frertwire on the neck of your acoustic guitar stays where it is, but right after the nut, another piece of fretwire is installed, over which the strings ride. And because this piece of fretwire comes before the first fretwire, it is called 'zero fretwire'. It does the job that the nut ordinarily does, for the strings ride over it, but it is ...

How many of you rhythm players, who play with a plectrum/pick, find the bone saddle and nuts are a little too responsive and the sound a little too loud? How many of you feel that it would be so much better if the response was mellower and even a little subdued? I think I have the answer. If you have been a regular visitor to this blog, you know how much I fancy bone for nuts and saddles over any other material. However, for a good part of a year, I have been messing around with the thought: what if ...

Believe it or not, Yamaha can make a good acoustic instrument too! That was a joke! Yamaha makes excellent stuff once you cross the Rs 22 - Rs 25K price threshold. I am the unfortunate one that I have encountered only their Rs 9 - 10K models, of which I have opened my heart out on more than one occasion (Search 'Yamaha' on the blogsite). So, when the youngster was pulling out the guitar from the gig bag, unconsciously my eyes rolled up, as I spotted the 'Yamaha' logo on the headstock. But this was a different guitar. Imagine my ...

Remember how I say trouble comes to me in twos and threes? Well, soon after the visit of the Fender CD140, Guitar repair – The pain of fretwire-levelling! as I sat down to wipe the sweat of my brow, came in this Yamaha FX 280. The complaint: terrible fret buzz all along the thinnest two strings. The guitar seemed to be a seemingly new buy with the staple plastic nut and uncompensated plastic saddle in place. It was a very pretty guitar but full of smudges. The thing with sunburst finishes is that though they look stunning, they are fingerprint ...

There come moments in everyone's life which test a man's patience and abilities. I think this instrument brought along with it one of those moments for me. This guitar -  a Fender CD140 - was good-looking, well-kept and clean, and came in with the complaint of a buzz on the B string on the 13th fret. By experience I have learned that once it gets that specific, there's bound to be a raised fretwire somewhere. Still, following due process, I first checked neck straightness. It was straight enough with the right amount of relief, and true enough, there was a ...

This guitar was brought in by an apprehensive young lady and it belonged to an elder sibling, who had since moved to foreign shores for better academic prospects. If you did not look at the headstock, it looked much like the guitar from a couple of weeks ago, brought in by a father, who's girl was to return shortly from the US. Guitar repair – It’s not always the instrument…sometimes it’s the sentiment attached! Only, this one also had no label to it - a nameless creation. Like that one, it had all the tell-tale signs of not enough love ...

So, this one returned. It was kind of embarrassing because I could not remember the instrument for the life of me. I was even more embarrassed when the owner was positively convinced that I did something to it akin to bringing it back from the dead!! Incidentally, it was a trans-acoustic guitar - it was one of those things that not only carries its own equaliser but even its own speaker in its belly. Any recollections? None! Now? None, whatsoever!  Maybe, I'm growing old! Anyway, the problem (this time) was that it was buzzing under amplification and the action made ...

And that statement is as true as the sun will rise tomorrow! In this line of work, not often do I get the opportunity to interact with people my own age, unless it is a mother accompanying the son to ensure that I do not fleece him, or a father chaperoning his daughter, guarding her against the 'evil eye'. The other day, however, in walked a genial gentleman with a guitar that had certainly seen better days. He wished to have it ready for his daughter who was returning from the US of A. It was in a gig bag ...

Sometimes, life presents you with a problem so complex that you're left scratching your head about where to begin! Recently, I was accosted by one such problem. It was called EX(tra)L(arge)???? I've seen a few guitars that carried signs of carelessness: a saddle that had dropped out, a black bridgepin standing proud among five white ones...But this one amazed me. It had all the tell-tale signs of a guitar that had been stripped (almost at gunpoint) of all that it possessed: saddle, strings, tuning machines, bushings, truss rod cover, heel cap...All that remained were three screws (the photo above) on ...

And you all know how much I love the lower end product range of Yamaha, here in India! If you don't, search for 'Yamaha' on this blogsite and read on! And because I love the F310, F310P and the F280 so much, another one of those landed up on my work table! It seemed that the young man who brought me the instrument had left it standing a day too long. A cursory inspection revealed that the guitar hadn't been played much and the only sign that it was more than a couple of years old, was the belt rash ...

Recently, I received a call asking me if I would look at an acoustic guitar with a belly. I said that I most certainly would, but added that my efforts to reduce it may or may not succeed. Despite the disclaimer, the young man - actually a chef at a city hotel - landed up with his guitar. However, the belly was far less than what I had been given to understand. But I did peep inside to take a look at the bridgeplate and its surroundings to check if there were some loose braces. From what I saw, I ...

This question was put to me again by a steel-string guitar owner, and I don't blame the questioner. There are as many opinions on this as there are guitarists or guitars!!! But shall we put this debate to rest, once and for all? IT'S PERFECTLY SAFE TO CUT ALL THE STRINGS ON YOUR WESTERN FLAT-TOP (STEEL STRING) GUITAR AT ONE GO! So, how did the doubt arise in the first place? The Western flat-top guitar, as we know it, is a contemporary cousin of the Classical Guitar (Spanish Guitar), having evolved from it. The Classical Guitar - having its origins ...

Rave alert! I have raved about it before and I will repeat myself for - two reasons - reader memory is short, and yours truly was, himself, reminded of this malpractice when more than a couple of guitars walked into the Garage with monstrosities like this staring at him from the headstock.  It was frightening!   Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the extra length of string is provided by the manufacturer just in case you have a guitar with a tail-piece (see below). Never was the extra length of string provided for you to try and challenge the genius ...

You all might remember this one from some time back. It returned recently for a change of tuning machine sets. The owner was not happy with the tuning machines and also the crumbling buttons on them. If you don't remember the earlier visit by this instrument, you can read about it here Guitar repair – A novel problem in a classical Alhambra! As you can see, otherwise, the guitar was in very good shape, being kept well. However, the tuning machine set on the treble side was causing problems. As I looked at it closely, I discovered tell-tale signs of ...

A return customer brought me this to set the action on, for a set-up, and "do whatever I deemed fit". I was struck by its beauty - especially the bridgepins , but the action on the guitar was decidedly high, while the nut slots were cut too deep In fact, the B string was caught in its slot, sounding muted each time it was plucked. This is my second encounter with a Sire and the more I see of it, the more I'm impressed by it. If you would like to read about my first encounter, it's here Guitar repair ...

That was the point of conversation with a return customer. I will try my best to explain to you my answer that I gave him - as to all those who ask me. And in case it didn't strike you, we are talking about string gauges. 13s (.013" - .052/.054/.056") These are BIG strings (but in the industry they are referred to as 'Medium' strings!) and naturally they give a bigger bang for their buck. However, they are a bigger strain all round - on the joints of the guitar, as well as on your fingers, on the bridge, the ...

Happy New Year, folks! I'm back! Of late, I have had to tend to a slew of belly bulge cases. I hope to replicate for you all the explanation of the whys and wherefores that I usually give guitar owners. What is a belly bulge? A belly bulge is said to have occurred in an acoustic guitar when the area of its top behind the bridge - towards the end block - swells up and rises. Try and imagine: the strings are pulling that portion of the top towards the headstock and along comes the belly bulge aiding the strings ...

And, we return to that eternal question! I have dwelt upon this before (in the very early days of this blog) but since I have to explain to (almost) every customer which string would suit their style (and guitar) the best, I thought that I would put my thoughts down again for the benefit of the larger audience. If you care to read the earlier post on strings, you can do so here: Which strings to use; how often to change So, which strings you use is dictated by a few things: the guitar you play (its construction), your playing ...

The last time, I had announced that I shall no longer do (any) glue-up jobs between July and September and that I would welcome these jobs October onwards. This bridge-glue-up job came in October when the humidity gods were more benevolent, but this was an odd one. Obviously, it had been standing lonely in a corner of some forsaken room. You can make that out from the missing ferrules of the D and G string tuners. It had developed a handsome belly bulge and the bridge had started to come off. Wisely or not, the owner had taken it upon ...

I had been noticing for a couple of years now that each year, during July and August, all glue-up jobs would take two or three tries to get done. I always attributed it to my fault somewhere in the process. However, after two guitars this year led me quite a dance in the said two months, it suddenly struck me that it was not I but the weather that was to blame. And it had been the weather all along. With the epiphany came the decision: NO MORE GLUE-UP JOBS IN JULY, AUGUST & SEPTEMBER!!!!!! I guess that's fair warning ...

This guitar came in while I was still getting back from a bruising bout with viral fever, and trying to dig myself out from under mountains of work that had piled up all around the house! This had to be a quick job as it had to be returned to the owner fast. He had a gig upcoming and the action on the guitar was  very high, he said. Even without taking off the strings, I could make out that the fretboard had never seen a cloth. When I took the strings off - which, incidentally, weren't too old - ...