Month: March 2019

When you buy a new two-wheeler or four-wheeler, ideally, the showroom fine-tunes the vehicle before handing it over to you. What that little fine-tuning does is, it removes any small flaws that might have existed, making the vehicle perform to its optimum. Exactly in the same way, a new guitar – acoustic or electric – MUST BE SET UP TO THE PLAYER’S STYLE, for it to play the best that it can.

The set-up on a new guitar is ideally done in one of two ways: for the beginner and for the experienced player.

For the beginner

If you have started learning how to play a guitar, or intend to learn how to play it, and you purchase a new instrument, you MUST take it to an experienced guitar technician and have it set up. As explained earlier, this exercise will not only eliminate flaws in your instrument, but will also make it play the best that it can.

By spending a little extra money, the technician will improve the instrument’s playability, thus ensuring that you don’t fall out of love with playing your guitar. However, this is a job of approximation, a temporary set-up. He will call you back a year or 18 months later, ask you to play a little for him and watching your playing style, he will give the instrument a proper set-up.

For the intermediate player

Once you have played for a few years and have established a playing style, the luthier (guitar technician) will set up the guitar specifically to your style. Thus, the set-up for a finger-style player or a lead guitarist will get a much lower action, as compared to a rhythm guitarist or a country/folk style guitarist. The strings too, which he will suggest, will be suited to your playing style: thinner ones for the lead and finger-style artiste and thicker ones for the rhythm/country player.

 

The set-up proper

Everything related to or touching the strings has to be adjusted and/or modified when a proper set-up is given. Thus, the relief in the neck (how straight or curved the neck is), the action of the guitar at the 1^st and 12^th fret (distance of the lowest point of a string to the highest point of a fretwire), radius of the saddle and the nut (matching the curvature of the fretboard), the condition of the fretwires, tuning machines, the intonation of the instrument (whether an open string and the same string fretted at the 12^th fret sound exactly the same), all need to be worked upon.

Getting the relief right

Relief in the neck of any stringed instrument allows the strings the space they need to vibrate. Once you take off the strings from the guitar, the neck of the instrument should be absolutely straight. If it still has relief – a concave bend in it – it must be taken out by adjusting the truss rod with a hex key (Allen wrench). Similarly, if the neck has a back bow in it – a convex bend – that too must be removed by adjusting the truss rod.

How much is the relief can be checked by either placing a long enough straight-edge on the fretboard or holding down a string at the 1st and the 12th fret and then trying to tap around the 7th or 8th fret. At these points you should have just enough space to hear the ‘clink’ of the string as it hits the fretwire when you tap.

The truss rod is seated in the neck of the guitar and runs just underneath the fretboard. It can be accessed either through the soundhole of the guitar, or from the headstock end in some guitars. And yes, the neck and the fretboard are two different things stuck together! Never confuse one for the other.

After the truss rod is adjusted, the neck should be straight. Once the guitar gets strings and they are tuned up, the pull of the strings will give the neck a natural concave bend, which, nine out of 10 times, is enough for the strings to vibrate freely without affecting action.

 

Matching the radius of the fretboard, saddle and nut

On steel-string guitars (as opposed to nylon-string guitars) the fretboard has a slight curvature. This curvature is measured and must be the same on the top of the saddle and the top of the nut. If it is not then the saddle or the nut, or both, have to be given this curvature by sanding/filing them along their tops. Once the nut, fretboard and saddle have the same curvature, playing of the instrument is indeed a pleasure.

 

Getting the action right

If the action on your guitar is high, then to bring it down, the saddle is pulled out from its slot and some material is removed from the bottom of the saddle by sanding it. You get a reading of the action by placing a well-calibrated ruler on the 12^th fretwire. Know that if you wish to lower the action at the 12^th fretwire by 1 mm, you have to take away 2mm from the saddle (The 12^th fretwire is generally the halfway point of the string).

Once the saddle height is settled, we move to the nut end of the instrument. Again, the string height is measured at the 1^st fretwire. This is measured by pressing a particular string on the 3^rd fretwire.

 

The gap which is left at the 1^st fretwire, should be just enough to let a business card pass through. Specialised two-sided files are used to deepen the nut sots so that the desired height of the string is attained at the 1^st fret. This process is repeated for all the other five strings.

However, If the slots need to be filed down too much, and for all six strings, it is better to take matter off the bottom of the nut, just as in the case of the saddle.

Once done, strings should ideally sit half in the slot and half outside.

 

Getting the fretwires right

Many times, fretwires have not been seated properly in their slots. This can cause string buzz – a squeak produced by a string which is fretted anywhere before the raised fretwire. These can easily be re-seated by a firm knock with a jeweller’s hammer.

Many times, a fretwire can be seated very properly but it is still higher than the rest. An implement called a thick five-sided, flattened piece of aluminium, called the Fret Rocker, is used to check whether all the frets are in level or not. The five edges of the Fret Rocker are all of different lengths, each length enough to sit on just three fretwires at a time.

If there are more than two or three fretwires standing out, all the fretwires on the fretboard are levelled, crowned and polished.

The fretwires have rounded tops. Once they are filed, they get flattened and rough. To put the ‘roundness’ back in them, a specialised crowning file is used which works on each fretwire individually. To remove the roughness from all that filing, fretwires are rubbed with different grits of sandpaper (500 to 2000), and finally polished with a good chrome polish.

Also, if the guitar has been sitting in the showroom for long, fretwires can get tarnished or dull, which can again majorly affect the sound the instrument produces. Again, the fretwires go through the polishing process to make them gleam like new.

 

Getting the hardware snug

The tuning machines and the jack-input points are basically held by screws. These can get loosened over time, or in the case of a new guitar, may not have been tightened well enough in the first place. These need to be checked and tightened. However, caution must be exercised. The hardware on your guitar should be just tight enough to be snug. One doesn’t need to use the same kind of effort used to tighten the nuts on the wheels of your car.

 

Checking the intonation

Once all the above steps have been carried out, it is time to condition the fretboard and put on the strings. One last thing – and probably the most important thing – to be done is to check the intonation. Play a string open and then play it placing a finger at the 12^th fret. The two sounds should be the same except for their pitch. If not, the string is taken off and the top of the saddle is sanded in such a way that either the contact point of the string where it rides the saddle, either moves forward or goes back. This process is repeated till the unfretted and fretted string sounds the same. And then the process is repeated for all the other five strings.

That is the basic set-up process, a very labour and time-intensive process but well worth it. Without it, you would be either playing a wrong-sounding guitar or wasting way too much energy playing it.

This was the process for a new guitar. Older guitars need set-ups too – if they move from or to different climate conditions, or when the weather changes, or when fretwires develop furrows from where strings rub against them constantly. A change in the thickness of strings also requires a set-up anew.

When you put on new strings and are tuning it up, have you noticed how some strings go ‘twang’ and lose tension completely? It happens because the ball-end of the string was not seated properly and was actually stuck to the end of the bridgepin. The tension that you give it while tuning it up, pulls it off the bridgepin and it hits the bridgeplate (where it was supposed to rest in the first place). Fine! Where’s the problem?

Two, actually! One, strings are liable to break due to the sudden loss of tension. Also, when you start tightening them again, you may break them then too.

Secondly, the force with which the ball-end of the string hits the bridgeplate is liable to damage it badly if it happens every time you change strings.

Let’s do it right the first time and every time!

So, it’s time to change strings on your guitar. Old strings are off, the guitar has been thoroughly cleaned, polished, hardware given a tightening, polish and you are ready to put on new strings.

As you slip this bent string into the slot – with the ball-end longitudinal to the hole – the curvature in it forces it on to the bridgeplate and away from the bridgepin.

Also, it is a good idea to take a look at the ends of your bridgepins.

Notice the one on the right has a slight angle to it. It is on the face that has the groove in it, in which groove the string sits. What that angle does is help the ball-end of the string slip off the bridgepin end and rest naturally on the bridgeplate.

Now, notice the one on the left. That is how you get a bridgepin from the shop. That is how they came in your guitar when you bought it new. You have to make the left one look like the right one. How do you do that? Take a small, flat hobby file and file away at an approximate angle of 45 degrees. It should not take you more than 10-15 seconds to get it into shape.

If it is so necessary why don’t guitar manufacturers do this? It increases the time and cost, darling!

Do this for all the strings and all the bridgepins. Once you are through, you are ready to put on new strings and tune up your instrument.

No unneeded ‘twangs’ and bangs and you are ready to rock ’n’ roll!

Sometime back I had posted this guitar which needed a pick-up to be installed in it.

https://lkoguitargarage.com/recognise-this/

 

I was awaiting a specialised drill bit to work the end hole of this guitar and finally received it yesterday. Here is the finished product.

As you can see, these photographs were taken after I had strung up the guitar – almost as an afterthought.

Thus, I couldn’t capture the process of drilling the bridge through which the piezo pickup came up from under the top and now sits in the bridge, under the saddle.

Additionally, there is a microphone which is stuck to the bridgeplate, right under the bridge. 

 

Of course, there are no photos of the microphone sticking to the bridgeplate but I searched the net and found this. At least it gives you an idea of how things sit.

Internally mounted microphones capture a guitar’s natural resonance and harmonic overtones. This one should capture the full range of the soundboard’s (top’s) projection in addition to resonance. 

Let’s see how this bird sings!

 

It is not uncommon for players to dress up their instruments: decals, stickers, signatures, et al, have decorated acoustic guitars, probably since the time they were begun to be made. A change of hardware on the guitar, then, is quite common to improve performance as well as the aesthetics of things.

I had to take off the gold hardware – the tuning machines and the strap buttons – on this milky beauty

and replace it with an all-black set. The new set had a gear ratio of 18:1 (to understand this concept, refer to my last post – ‘Wishing to buy a real guitar?’). Naturally, the strings too would have to be replaced. Though not a branded instrument and not made of solid wood, it played true, held tune properly, had excellent action at the 12^th fret and at the bridge, and was an electro-acoustic guitar.

The most striking feature about the guitar was its abalone-like adornment and its f-shaped holes. F-shaped holes are a bit of a rarity in flat-top, American folk guitars with fixed bridges (bridges that are stuck to the top). Usually, one gets to see them on jazz guitars – quite a different set of strings – which have a completely different bracing pattern. The bridge on most jazz guitars is a floating one, which makes intonation adjustments a breeze, and strings just ride over it, being fixed at that end to a tailpiece and at the other, beyond the nut, to the tuning machines on the headstock.

The hardware that I was to put on it, looked like this:

I took off the strings and began taking off the gold hardware, when the thought struck me: what if the screw holes don’t match up with the new hardware? I took off one tuning machine and slipped in a new black one. Matching up the hole on the machine with the one on the guitar, I grimaced for, indeed, the holes were off by quite a bit.

I filled up the holes, painted each filling white and then let the guitar rest and dry. Then I marked the points where new holes would need to be drilled, measuring and cross-checking how the tuning machines sat in their slots and whether they were in line with those above and below them, as also whether they were in line with the ones opposite them. (I got so engrossed in the process that I forgot to take photographs of these steps – silly me!).

Anyway, new holes were drilled on the back of the headstock and the new tuning machines were screwed into place. This is what they looked like on the guitar.

Replacing the strap buttons was easy enough: unscrew old strap pin, take out, put new strap pin, screw on!

With new strings, the instrument was as good as new. And off went Venerable Vanilla home!

This post is aimed towards the intermediate-level player, who has now played for more than a couple of years and has attained a certain level of proficiency.

Wishing to buy a ‘real’ guitar, what are the things to bear in mind.

What to look for

1) The first and foremost thing to take note of when buying your first ‘real’ guitar is the wood used in its construction.

Why is that important? It is the top that moves when you strum a guitar. Its movement forces the air out of the instrument through the soundhole, and that produces sound. The more it moves, the more is the sound produced. To some extent even the back moves and helps in the propagation of sound.

So, if it is solid wood, the movement of the top (and the back) is that much uniform and better, vis a vis a plywood or a laminate guitar. Let me illustrate this by taking you back to school and into the physics class: refraction of light. Through a single medium, there is no refraction. And when light passes from one medium to another, the density of media comes into play.

Thus, if it is a single wood instrument, the transfer of sound is uniform without any loss of energy. In an instrument made of laminated wood, the varying densities of woods used are the reason for that dull and hollow sound that lacks sustain. The different woods absorb much of the vibrations, resulting in the ‘dead’ sound which you hear.

 

The wood combinations

There are traditional combinations of woods for the top, back and sides, which have withstood the ravages of their players and that of Time and have thus earned a reputation. The two most popular combinations are spruce and mahogany and spruce and rosewood – spruce for the top and mahogany and rosewood for the back and sides. Again, traditionally, the back and sides are always made from the same material – whether solid wood or laminate.

Spruce is a lighter/softer wood in comparison to mahogany and rosewood, and thus lends itself well to its role of having to move once the instrument is played. In comparison, both mahogany and rosewood are harder woods, serving their purpose of providing structural support without impeding sound.

And then there are varying types of spruce and within each type, categories, which are graded. Besides rosewood and mahogany, flame/tiger/quilted maple, walnut and cocobolo are also used for the back and sides, while cedar is a popular option for the top.

Cedar is warmer/muddier than spruce (lending itself well for rhythm guitar playing). Likewise, rosewood is harder than mahogany and maple, making the instrument sound warmer – with more bass. Increasingly, koa is being used in place of all three, being cheaper.

With growing environmental consciousness, man-made materials have made an entry into the guitar industry with quite spectacular results, though it will be some time before they really catch the fancy of players.

 

How to check whether it is really solid wood 

If you look through the soundhole of the guitar, you will notice a certain type of wood grain pattern. Turn the guitar around and look at the outside of the back of the guitar at the same point where you saw the pattern inside the guitar. If you see the same pattern outside too, it is a solid wood instrument. 

2) The bracing

Under the top, there is a bulwark of (generally) spruce wood that helps support it. Now, you might think that if the purpose of the top is to move, when the instrument is played, won’t this bulwark hamper that? Logical but not true.

These struts, or braces – as they are rightly called – only brace the top and stop it from caving in under the pressure of the pulling strings. They are placed in such a manner that they not only support the top but also help it to move, when the instrument is played.

Just carving the braces and putting them on the top or the back is an art in itself, and in factories of the bigger guitar manufacturers, there is an entire department of workers that work on just the braces. And then there is the boss, who inspects each brace and how it sits on the top or the back. No wonder, you like the sound of that guitar!

Braces may be scalloped or unscalloped. While the former, naturally, are more rigid, the latter allow freer movement of the top and thus, clearer sound. So, what should you look for?

If you are a finger-style player, go for scalloped braces. If you are a rhythm guitarist and love to accompany singers or players, choose an unscalloped instrument.

 

3) The Tuning Machines

If ever you try and replacing the tuning machines on your guitar, you will know that there is a huge price range they are available in.

You will be surprised to note that the most plain looking of them are more expensive than the more ornamental of them. And then there are those that are really fancy-looking and cost a right eyeball, a left ear and a right leg just for one piece!!!! This is because tuning machines are assessed on their gear ratio. The gear ratio is ascertained by the number of teeth on the gears of the machine, which helps tune the instrument to a greater accuracy.

On open-back tuners, you will be able to see the gear. Count the number of teeth on it. 12, 14, 16, 18, 21: the more the teeth, greater the accuracy.

The gear ratio is the number of turns of the tuning key which will make a complete turn of the string post. A tuner with an 18:1 gear ratio means that you would need to turn the tuner knob 18 times to make the string post go around one complete revolution.

When buying a guitar, once you have chosen the guitar that you wish to buy, ask the salesperson the gear ratio of the tuning machines. If you are not happy with the gear ratio, you can always have the tuning keys replaced with something better. But then, be prepared to shell out extra moolah for them!

 

Everything else!

If all of the above are in order, the rest, whatever it is, can be changed or replaced at a later date. Strings, saddle and nut, bridgepins, pickguard installation or removal, rosewood fretboard and bridge versus an ebony fretboard and bridge – even the fretwire – can easily be swapped one for the other.

The one reservation that I would make here is that though even the colour of the paint and polish of the instrument can be changed, it takes a real expert to strip the instrument of the finish on the instrument and put on new one.

It is not unheard of that while stripping a guitar of its finish, some part of the guitar got scraped off too!!!!

 

In conclusion

The cost of a real wood guitar is – at least – 10 times that of an ordinary guitar but then the manpower that is used to make it, knows what needs to be done to make a real instrument. And so it is that when you play a real wood instrument, you are forced to close your eyes at the beauty of the sound emanating from the instrument.

Also, a real wood instrument requires much greater care in terms of keeping the moisture content of the wood measured and replenished in times of need, failing which, it can easily let the rot set in.

 

DISCLAIMER: All of the above was general knowledge. There is nothing in this mortal world which says that a plywood guitar can NEVER sound as good as a solid wood instrument, or, conversely, a solid wood instrument CAN’T SOUND AS ORDINARY as a plywood instrument!!!!