Month: June 2024

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 so in relation to the neighbouring ones. Invariably, after filing one, you will find another one standing proud two fretwires down the line – at least that has always been my experience.

Though both instruments were beautiful in their own right, the one with the natural finish was buzzing only on 1st fret of the treble ‘e’ string, while the one with the sunburst finish was buzzing around the 11th-12th fret of the bass ‘E’ string, the owner informed me.

I decided to work first on the natural finish guitar. Getting to work, I found some six or seven fretwires between the 3rd and the 14th – 15th fret. However, some of them readily sat down when tapped. For the stubborn ones, I knew I would have to sweat a lot. But, no sweat!

I pulled out my tools, sandpapers, polishing compounds et al and got to work. Do remember that both instruments had used strings on them. I couldn’t take them off, or I would have problems when it came time to test for the buzz (you can never really test for string buzz without strings). So, loosening the strings, the first round of levelling was completed. Strings were tightened but the buzz was still there.

Again I set about finding high frets and found it at the 3rd or 4th fret.

As I tightened the strings, I broke the ‘e’ string

and had to replace it. As I continued work and continued finding high fretwires, the loosening and tightening continued and I broke the ‘e’ string again. Again it was replaced, more work was done, more loosening and tightening and the ‘G’ string broke.

At that point, a cheap set of strings was thrown on in consultation with the owner.

Finally, I could not find any more high frets and the guitar played buzz-less.

But before I had strung it up, I performed this simple operation to ensure that string ball-ends did not catch at the end of the bridgepins.

Also, I snugged up the hardware on the headstock, while it was accessible.

After all that work, the buzz was reduced but not gone completely. I looked at the nut slots and they were a little deep for my liking.

On the left is the original nut and on the right is a new nut, to show you the difference between the slot depths. Maybe, I thought, because the instrument had a very low action (both at the 1st and the 12th fret) that it was buzzing.

As I took off the nut, I noticed something strange. While cutting the nut slot, someone careless at the factory had dug in too deep. Then it seemed, he cut from the other end, leaving a step in between. I measured the two ends of the slot and both were the same height.

If the treble side of the slot had been lower, one could have presumed that the buzz was due to this, but that wasn’t the case. Also, the owner had confirmed that the buzz was a recent development.

For my own satisfaction, I bridged the step with a little piece of pickguard material.

I tried on the new nut and the buzz was all but gone.

Again I tested for high frets and found two truant ones. Once those were brought in line, the guitar played like a dream.

The fretboard was cleaned and oiled and while I was at it, some love was also shown to the bridge

I left the cheap set of strings on so that the owner could check the string buzz.

The Sunburst Sire was next on the work table. If you remember there were a couple of fretwires on the bass ‘E’ string that were causing problems. There turned out to be six of them

Unlike those on its Natural cousin, fretwires on this Sire refused to be beaten down and had to be filed, recrowned and polished. The same back and forth as before. But the buzz refused to go. Again, the relief in the neck was optimum.

Then I turned my attention to the saddle and realised that it could be raised a little without raising the action too much.

For trial’s sake, I swapped the original saddle for a new slightly taller saddle, and lo and behold, the buzz was gone!

So, it wasn’t just a low saddle and it wasn’t just high fretwires; it was a combination of both that was causing the guitar to buzz.

The new saddle stayed and I called the owner to come and pick up his guitars. He was happy with the Natural but when he sat down to play the Sunburst, he checked the treble ‘e’ string first, which buzzed like if it had a buzzer in it.

To my shock he told me that this was the problem area in the guitar and I had to tell him that he had, in fact, pointed it out on the bass ‘E’ string, which had been corrected. Anyway, since there was a problem, it had to be corrected. Besides, it was my fault that I did not check the entire fretboard properly.

The work began all over again, this time on the treble side.

That is the before and after of the work done on the treble side.

And, of course, the extra work on the guitar was also done

Hardware on the headstock was tightened,

the fretboard and bridge were treated,

and bridgepin ends were given an angle so that string ball ends would stay off them.

The owner had also provided me with two sets of these

He requested that I put on one of these on the Sunburst, and so it was.

But I was truly happy with the break angle achieved at the bridge with the new, taller saddle. The owner came, tested the guitar and took it home, but I will wait for his call to tell me that magically, the sound and sustain on the instrument has increased appreciably. That is what a healthy break angle does to an instrument.

It was hard work over some five or six days but then there is no greater pleasure than to see instruments that come to you with a problem, get cured.

As always, I leave you with last images of the Sire Siblings

 

 

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 excellent bone saddle, I got thinking. Does it make sense – financial and otherwise – to put in a bone saddle in an instrument that will be played only sometimes and has more sentimental value than practical value?

At the last moment, I decided to install a plastic saddle that may not be the best but was functional. Going by the neck angle I knew that even this saddle would need to be shaved down.

Now, I own a small belt sander with variable speed, but even at its lowest speed, it tends to melt the plastic rather than sand it. So, it was the old fashioned way that I went: sanding by hand.

The work that remained was purely cosmetic, namely, covering the footprint of the old bridge immediately surrounding the new bridge. After taping off the margin, I hand-painted the area.

Now, the bridgepin holes needed to be drilled to be ready to receive strings. However, care needed to be taken that the pressure from the drill didn’t dislodge the freshly glued bridgeplate. So, I clamped up the bridgeplate with these clamps

Before I strung up the guitar, there was one last job to be taken care of: shaping the bridgepins so that the ball ends of the string did not catch onto them

The strings that the owner had chosen were these

The action, as I saw it, was not ideal but the neck angle being what it was dictated it. It was certainly not unplayable, but most certainly difficult on the upper frets.

As always, I leave you with a photo of the finished job

 

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 of emotions rose inside me, I knew that I must do this.

But it was in a pitiable condition.

The truss rod cover was missing

The bridge was lifting (it gaped much more than it seems to in the photograph)

It had no bridgeplate – no, I don’t mean that it was broken, but, in fact, it seemed that men at the factory had forgotten to put one in!!!! I know you can’t make out much from my crappy photograph but what I say is true. It was amazing that the guitar had withstood the wrecking tension of the strings for any period of time; 20 years was unimaginable.

It was as dust-laden as anything would be after years of standing around

The purfling was coming loose, which had been held in place by ordinary scotch-tape.

So, the first order of business was to take the bridge off. It came off easily but left a horrifying sight. So damaged and flimsy was the top that I had no option but to cut it out

What was left of the top underneath the bridge footprint was so flimsy, brittle and worthless that without a patch underneath to shore it up, it would never have stood against string tension. Also, since it did not have a bridgeplate, there was need to install one.

For the choice of wood for the bridgeplate, I thought hard and I thought long. Finally, I decided that putting in a maple patch into a guitar which will serve as a leave-at-home guitar and be sparingly played, would be a waste and rake up the cost too.

I decided to go with these

These look like ice-cream sticks but these are actually craft sticks – much sturdier than your usual ice-cream sticks. Yes, these can also be used as ice-cream sticks.

Both sides of each were first sanded and then their edges too, to roughen them up so that they would hold glue and stick better to each other. Three layers of these were stuck together, slowly

which finally resulted in this

These are the two sides of the bridgeplate. While the first one was the face which got stuck to the top, the second one is the face where the string ballends would rest.

But the bridgeplate was too big for the space in between the braces, and so, through trial and error, the right size was sawed and sanded out and stuck

Now, came the difficult part: recreating the top in the part that was missing. That too I decided to fashion out of the sticks.

Fitting in the last bit of the ‘top’ was more laborious than the entire bridgeplate. First, I cut out a dummy on a piece of card, refined it, tried inserting it into the gap, refined it again and again till I thought it was perfect.

Transferring the shape onto wood, I discovered that it wasn’t as perfect as I thought. More refining, more sanding till the piece fit in.

The little spaces all around were filled in too till I had something that looked like a top, on top of which, the new bridge could be glued.

Meanwhile, as I was working on the bridgeplate, I also moistened the top and clamped it down, so that it would stay straight. 

   

Once the bridgeplate was ready, it was carefully glued in

Next came the new bridge. I drilled out the holes and scored the back, but by just placing the bridge on the top, I knew that it was much smaller than the footprint of the original bridge.  The owner was okay with me painting the overshooting border of the top, in black, by hand.

But before I glued the bridge, I marked its position in tape.

Inside this boundary, the glue was smeared and the bridge glued on

Thankfully, with the amount of glueing that had to be done, I had the humidity on my side:

While the glue under the bridge cured, I got to the other smaller jobs.

The purfling on the side was glued in,

a truss rod cover was fashioned out of some pickguard material I had lying around,

the hardware on the headstock was oiled and tightened,

the zero fretwire (which had developed divots) was filed and polished,

 

and, the new saddle’s length was recorded.

Read about the rest in the next post. Until then…!

 

   

 

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 not as if the nut is relegated to the dust bin. It stays very much where its spot is, only, the string slots in it are considerably deeper. This is to keep the strings in place without allowing them to slide off the fretboard. The slots in the nut are as deep as the height of the zero fretwire.

Contrary to popular belief, the zero fretwire is exactly the same height as the other fretwires and generally made of the same material.

 

So what does a zero fretwire do?

Think of the zero fretwire as a very low nut. As the strings ride over it, they are much lower than what their height would be, had they been riding a traditional nut. What this does is ensure that all strings are relatively low all along the fretboard. And if you take care of the height of your saddle, you have comfortably low action all along the fretboard.

How this particularly helps is that you can barre your ‘F’ chord with an ease hitherto unknown.    

Of course, rhythm players love it but lead players love the arrangement the most. 

 

Disadvantages of the zero fretwire

Like I said earlier, the strings ride on the zero fretwire and that the zero fretwire is generally made of the same material as the rest of the fretwires on the instrument. Now, the preferred material for fretwire is cupro nickle though stainless steel is also available. Given the ease with which cupro nickle can be worked with (as opposed to stainless steel), it is used on most instruments. 

And that, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is also the undoing of the material. Because it is easily adaptable and tractable, the strings rubbing over it also damage it, demanding that it be replaced.

 

Why is the zero fretwire not used more often?

What I am about to say is entirely my observation of things. You are free to criticise it or agree with it. 

One: Guitar-building is comparatively a new art form, borrowing its learnings from violin makers and lute makers of Europe. Innovation does not play a part when it comes to changes in the basic structural format. Embellishments and minor deviations are followed at best.

Two: There seems to be an underlying fear that given the wear that the zero fretwire will face that it will have to be frequently replaced. To put things in perspective for you, how many times in your guitar’s life have you had to have its fretwires replaced? So, if it the same material used for the zero fretwire, how often would you have to replace it???   

Me? I have loved working on zero fretwire instruments and I have loved playing them equally!

 

P.S.: This post is a special post for the Lucknow Guitar Garage website had crashed and could be revived only after the intervention of the web-hosts. In the process, I lost the last post (of last Sunday) only.

Hopefully, now it will continue to run smoothly, without any hinderance.