Month: April 2021

Another opportunity for me to impress upon you the need for an initial set-up on a new acoustic guitar.

Of course, one can always get a set-up done a few years down the line too, but by then string tension would have changed a lot of the instrument’s geometry, and you may not get the same results as you would get with the guitar still new.

How I explain it to customers and people interested is with the example of getting a shirt or a dress stitched. The tailor takes measurements, cuts and rough sews the garment. Then you take a trial, point out things that you would like changed. Often, these changes are in millimetres, but they make all the difference to how the garment sits on you. 

Acoustic guitars are not very different, mass produced as they are. Each and every instrument requires a set-up for it to play the best that it can. With big-name Martins, Gibsons and Guilds the adjustments made may be very small but still those have to be dialled in for the instrument to give true pleasure. 

About Tanglewood, it is a relatively young guitar manufacturing, British firm making ukuleles, classical instruments, banjos and guitars. It is possible that you may not have heard about it but the brand does get exported to 60 countries, and in Britain, it has quite a following. Read up on it!

The one that came to me, was six-eight months old and it had been played. And when I say it had been played, I mean it had been PLAYED!!!!

I started with the nut and saddle, plastic nothings that did nothing for sound transfer and sustain and replaced them with bone elements.

And then I worked on the fretboard and bridge. After the fretboard had been cleaned, I even burnished the fretwires some and made the fretboard look that much pretty.

The owner’s choice of strings was this and so they went on the guitar and it was set-up for those strings.

Meanwhile, I must tell you that I have acquired a new friend to help me in my work. We’re still getting to know each other but I think it should be a good partnership.

When the owner came to pick up his guitar, he paid me the biggest compliment yet. As he took it in his hands and strummed it once, an involuntary ‘Ahh!’ escaped his mouth. After he had played it a bit, he just said, ‘Amazing’! 

I am not a great fan of scribbling or drawing on one’s instrument. Stickers? Totally sacrilegious! But that’s my opinion.

That said, every once in a while, incidents happen, or one comes across things that put one’s beliefs and theories in perspective. It happened to me when this guitar came to me recently.

Hand-painted, it was a stunning representation of Lord Shiva’s Tripundra (the three marks of anointment on his forehead). You may have seen this (in India) in sticker form on car rear windshields, but this acrylic paint, hand-painted version on the headstock of this guitar I found absolutely gripping.

And that was not all!

The body carried this beautifully detailed work of a falcon landing, its wing span spanning the breadth of the lower bout. And don’t miss the rangoli-like creation around the soundhole. Stunning, wouldn’t you say?

Indeed, it is creations like these that lend character to an instrument without taking away any of its tonal qualities.

Alright! So, it was a beautiful guitar. What was it in for?

The fretboard was separating from the neck. This was the owner’s – a creative and sensitive being – first guitar. Attached as he was to it, he did not get rid of it despite his family imploring him to do something about it. Instead, he continued to search for a place that would bring healing to this instrument. And that is how this instrument landed up on the counter of the Lucknow Guitar Garage.

It was actually a Pluto, with steel strings and a slotted headstock. You probably won’t be able to read the model number but it reads HW39-201N.

If the combination of steel strings and a slotted headstock is alien to you, let me tell you that many – from CF Martin & Co to boutique builders – have come out with such models over the years. The idea was to somehow marry the sustain of the classical guitar (thought to be partly due to the slotted headstock) with the volume of the flat-top guitar.

And while I was at it, I decided to do my favourite manoeuvre: swap the plastic nut and saddle with bone elements. To those who are still not sure whether it would make a difference, let me drop you  a statistic. In the three years that I have been repairing guitars in India, EVERY customer has reported back that the swap has worked wonders to the tone and sustain of the instrument.

But the most important work was to get the fretboard and the neck together again – and make them stay there. Nothing that good quality wood glue and a set of – or half-a-dozen – clamps won’t do.

And while it was clamped and I had nothing to do but wait, I decided to focus on the tuning machines. A drop of oil in each of them got them turning smooth again.

When I took the clamps off, the break had healed but not too cleanly. Thus, began the process of hiding the seam line – more to touch than to the eye.

Some painter’s tape, my concoction of sawdust and wood glue, some sanding and some matching black paint, and it was good. Not that the repair was invisible to the eye; it was. More importantly, you couldn’t feel a transition line. 

A little cleaning and oiling, and the fretboard and bridge looked like new

Pop in the missing pieces and

Voila!!!!

However, I could not give the customary rubdown to the top, thanks to the intricate art work on it. But, when the owner came to pick up the guitar, he was more than happy with the results. The guitar’s still singing and so is he!

 

I’d love to tell you that the way this guitar (a Fender CD-60) looks is because of me but I would be lying. These are the before pictures, for there are people who don’t just play the instrument but keep it squeaky clean too.

This is a return customer and even on his first visit I had complimented him on how clean he kept his guitar. He had murmured, ‘I try’.

This time around the instrument was in for new strings, a nut change, a new strap button and general maintenance.

Also, the owner complained of a buzz on the ‘B’ string in the 3rd or the 4th fret.

As soon as I heard that I felt like exclaiming, ‘Aa-ha!!!’ but that wouldn’t have been very correct. It would have been like you taking a sick relative to a doctor and he exclaiming ‘Aa-ha!!!’

April and May are the two driest months of the year – at least in these parts of Uttar Pradesh – and the season demands that acoustics be given love, attention, and a drink of water. Even as you are reading this, check the relative humidity. I bet it is between 20% and 35%.

However, for an acoustic guitar to stay in ship shape, the humidity inside the body of the guitar must read between 45% and 55%!

A few days after I worked on this instrument, I began getting calls from prior customers about odd string buzzes that they had not experienced before. I am afraid that soon there’s going to be a string of instruments that will need similar buzzes addressed!

Shall I let you in on a little secret? Even electric guitars get affected by the lack of humidity, but since they have solid bodies, that effect often tends to escape notice.

Anyway, I changed the nut on the guitar and the buzz disappeared, so, it wasn’t the humidity that was the devil in this guitar. And since it got a new nut, I decided to give it a quick set-up too, by adjusting the height of the saddle, so that the action was really comfortable.

The strap button was simple enough: mark, drill and screw on the new button.

However, the owner wished to retain the original strap button too. I asked him again whether I should remove the original one on the shoulder of the guitar but he did not want me to.

So, this instrument left the Garage wearing two strap buttons!

And that is just me, admiring the guitar before I threw on the strings. It got these

Checking with the owner about the health of the guitar a few days ago (as I generally do), I was happy to learn that the owner was very happy with the way it was playing. I think he replied to my message saying, “Probably the best action I’ve had on it so far”!

 

P.S.: It’s Sunday and I thought before I make this post public, it would be a good idea to check the humidity once. Here is what I saw, and it’s marked in red!

 

 

As I have described on the ‘Home’ page and ‘About’ page of this blog, the effort of the Lucknow Guitar Garage – the workshop and the blog – is to try and help out people (guitar owners) who are in the same position as I once was, and to spread awareness about the instrument and its upkeep.

I derive a lot of satisfaction helping out people who have a special, sentimental attachment to their instruments. This particular instrument – like many others – fell in that category.

The owner, a young and accomplished musician, said he played the instrument one night, stood it up, and in the morning, found it like this

Being attached to the instrument, he did not discard it, but continued to search for someone who could repair it. And that is how, after more than a couple of years of searching, it landed on my counter top.

Naturally, the neck was the major job here, and thankfully, when I brought the two planes together, they sat rather well, except for a few places where some slivers of wood had gone missing. There were minor issues too that needed attending to.

The fretboard and bridge were dried out

and that nut and saddle would have to go

I was confident that this glue-up would turn out alright, if only I could get glue into the deepest recesses of the dried out break. To get glue in there I decided to give it a shot in the neck!

A second issue was providing enough force to keep the break together for an extended period of time: at least 24 hours. Many years ago, I had built this simple jig that fits the profile of the neck, while one side is flat. With that in place, I managed to clamp up the break with one jaw of the clamp resting on the fretboard (under a piece of leather, of course), and its other jaw resting on the flat end of the jig.

With glue pumped in, and everything clamped tight, the squeeze-out only encouraged my belief that the break would, indeed, heal well.

The paper that you see has been deliberately placed in between the jig and the neck. With all that glue around, we wouldn’t want a piece of wood that huge getting stuck to the neck!

With everything as I wanted it and the curing left to Time, I now had time enough to concentrate on other things.

I cleaned up the fretboard and bridge and took out the roughness on the bridge with five grits of sandpaper.

Then it was the turn to work on the new bone saddle

Also, the dirty, crusty headstock and tuning machines were given a polish and a tightening.

Twenty-four hours later, the joint had cured and the clamp came off.

Now was the time to check how the break in the neck had affected the fretboard and the fretwires.

Checking three fretwires at a time revealed what I was apprehensive about. There were many fretwires that had either lifted or were raised in comparison to their neighbours. Notice the red markings on the wires? That particular fretwire and at that point was raised.

That called for a levelling, crowning and polishing. At the end of it, I cleaned and oiled the fretboard and the bridge too.

Then it was back to the neck and trying to camouflage the fault line as much to touch as to the eye. Again the many grits of sandpaper helped me out, and when I was satisfied that the fault line was no longer perceivable to touch, I began to work on trying to hide it to the eye as much as possible. Work began by marking the boundary.

I planned to use a wood-filler tinted to match the colour of the wood of the neck. The tape was an effort to protect the fretboard getting coloured too.

What followed, was fine sanding to merge the filler with the surrounding wood,

And as a last step: some lacquer to make everything look pretty.

Nice? Yeah! Even I liked it! Not perfect but nothing that would draw your eye to it, and more importantly, very functional.

Now, it was time to make everything else shine like the neck. Some soap and warm water and my kitchen towels were like this

but the guitar shone like this

In all that shifting and moving, something inside the guitar made it sound like a Maracas Shaker. Wondering what it could be, I peeped in through the soundhole and saw this

Seemingly, in the years that the instrument had been left standing, rats and mice had found the insides to be a safe haven. There were enough chewed up bits of paper to form a notebook out of, and if you fell short, there were rat droppings too. These were what had made a rattle out of the guitar (The liquid excrement that must have undoubtedly been there too, had long dried up!) 

In preparation for the stringing, I shaped the bridgepins

and put on these. I would have gone with 12s but there was no knowing whether the neck would be able to take their strain. 

I set the guitar up and in six hours everything had gone out of whack. I did it again, and again everything came to naught. I was fearing this for wood has a tremendous memory. You leave it in one position for too long and it will keep wanting to return to that position.

So, I asked the owner to take the guitar home and bring it back to me in a week, 10 days’ time. He did, and in that time, he played it with that high action to his heart’s content. 

After setting it up, the neck moved yet again, so much so that after having taken off almost half of the saddle, initially, I had to shim it with a piece of bone, and again set it up. Let’s hope that this time the neck behaves itself.

Here are a few photographs of the guitar before it finally left me

My parting advice to the owner: next string change, go for 12s and observe the action daily for at least 10-15 days. If he feels that the action has risen even a bit, he should loosen the strings and bring the guitar right back. 

From then on, it would have to be 11s for the guitar, otherwise, the instrument was good for 12s!

Of course, the owner was more than pleased, but much more than that, it was a job most satisfying for me.