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Often, when the season changes you develop a cold and a cough. In much the same manner, your acoustic instrument is likely to develop a string buzz.

The reason for this is that wood being a dynamic material, expands and contracts under the effect of temperature and humidity changes of the environment. The wood expands and contracts at a certain rate but the metal fretwire does so at vastly different rate. This uneven expansion or contraction of the wood and frets results in the very irritating fret buzz.

However, the above statements are true only of solid wood guitars (those that have single pieces of wood as their top, back and sides, and are not made of laminated wood – plywood). And that is why changing seasons are deadly for solid wood guitars. So, why make them? Why buy them?

For their sound! You have to sit down with a solid wood guitar and play it to understand the pleasure of it.

You would remember me working on this beautifully constructed all-wood guitar. This came in again, recently, afflicted by the ‘seasonal fret buzz’.

Trying to find the errant fret(s), I went over the fretboard with a fretrocker (a five-sided steel piece milled absolutely flat on each side), three frets at a time. Finally, I managed to locate the ‘popped up’ frets and marked them.

When one levels, radiuses and re-crowns the fretboard, one is tackling all the frets, but during spot-fixing, one only needs to focus on two or three frets (which are, more often than not, in succession). Thus, not taking off the strings to work on the frets is often possible, though I took off the strings on this one, as I had to change them in any case.

Otherwise, introducing two small wooden blocks between the strings and the fretboard, raises the strings and gives you enough room in between, to work on the frets.

The painter’s tape that I used was to protect the fretboard from the various files and grits of sandpaper used in getting the truant frets, first in line and then, in shape.

As I went about stringing her up, I found the action was high too. That demanded the saddle to be taken down.

The contraption I am using is sandpaper super-glued to painter’s tape, which is stuck to a piece of scrap MDF. The flatness of the MDF helps sand the saddle (or the nut) very straight, without there being any possibility of it tilting.

Finally, as I was tuning up the instrument, I was really pleased to notice that there was still an excellent break angle being created at the saddle. The steeper the angle at which a string ‘breaks’ over the saddle or nut, the more downward pressure it applies to that saddle or nut. That downward pressure helps in the transfer of sound, and thus, a fuller, richer sound.

Chilli here is in great shape – as you can see. It’s a 12-string Jumbo. I had to change its strings and give its fretboard and bridge a little drink of the magic potion, which while nourishing them, also made their grain pop. Eventually, I shone up Chilli even more. 

This one is special. It has a bone saddle and nut…AND, abalone-topped brass bridgepins. They say that metal bridgepins seem to accentuate the high register of the instrument. We will check that out once we string ’er up!

But do look at that bridge. Beautiful! However, the overriding thought here is that because it is not a single, solid piece of wood, thicker strings just won’t do. Also, it’s a 12-string – double the tension that six strings exert.

Extra-light strings it is then (.010” – .047”). But even with a larger headstock stringing her up was a pain because the space between tuning machines is very small, and keeping track of ball-ends, which bridgepin goes into which hole, which string pairs with which string…

It took me a couple of hours but it was well worth the time. What’s more, the action on this stunner is lower than normal and there’s no buzzing anywhere along the fretboard.

And yes, the metal bridgepins do brighten up the sound appreciably, a joy for a finger-style player.

Extreme beauty – natural or manmade – has the ability to leave one speechless. I was too, after seeing this abalone-inlaid, solid-spruce-top, laminated-rosewood-back-and-sides beauty.

Suffice it to say that I have not seen a more beautiful acoustic instrument in my life, and believe me, I have seen a few. I could not believe my eyes and I just kept turning it over in my hands.

Admiring it, there were a few problems that were apparent. The action seemed sky-high and, of course, the bridge was lifting, as was the neck heel-to-body joint. I looked at the strings and they looked heavier than what I usually see. As I pulled out my digital vernier calipers and measured the thickness of the strings, they read .013” – .056”! And there lay the problem.

  

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, if it is big money that you are investing in an instrument, PLEASE, also invest some time in reading the user/instruction manual very carefully. You have spent a decent pile on your instrument; spend a bit of time reading the manual too. If you didn’t get a manual, get onto the internet, type in the model number of your instrument and you will get a free user/instruction manual in PDF format.

In there, you will find all the specifications that you need – including what size strings are recommended. If it says use .010” (high E – thinnest) string, you can experiment with .011 string set, no thicker. You could even go one step down and try .09”, but that’s your leeway – one below and one higher.

The big boomers on this guitar – .013” – .056” – put way to much tension on the bridge and the neck heel-to-body joint, and this particular instrument wasn’t built to take that much strain. Naturally, it was literally coming apart at the seams.

The first thing to do was to take off the strings and let the guitar relax for a full day.

With the strings off, I decided to take a look under the hood. Handsomely scalloped braces supported the solid spruce top, though they could have been scalloped cleaner and neater. The bridgeplate was in not too bad a shape.

After that, I turned my attention to the bridge. After taping it off so that I wouldn’t scratch the beautiful finish on the top, I heated up the smallest and thinnest moulding knife that I had. With the knife hot, I went prising into the corner of the bridge that was lifting. Some minutes and a few bigger palette knives later, the bridge was off and in a relatively clean manner.

   

Cleaning and sanding off both surfaces under high magnification, I let that part of the instrument be as I concentrated on the more difficult job that needed to be done. I had to completely detach the neck from the body!

The need for doing it was because without taking off the neck, the crack would never be glued back cleanly and completely.

In luthierese (Did I just coin a word?), guitar-building jargon, the neck-removal is referred to as steaming off a neck, for you actually inject steam into the neck, helping melt the glue, which lets go of the neck, and you can then separate the neck from the body.

For that, you need to pull out a fret, drill a couple of holes and use them alternating between the two to inject steam. And that’s how it went. 35 minutes later, the neck was off.

While the glue was still gummy, I scraped off the majority of it, leaving the rest to be sanded off later. Then it was Rest time for the guitar and me. I left the instrument to dry off for a complete two days before I returned to it. Taking a file to it, I filed out the dried glue till only the wood could be seen on both surfaces (the neck as well as on the guitar). For the little studs, I cut strips of sandpaper and sanded them clean.

   

It was time to put everything together. But before that one last thing needed to be done. I took spirit and cleaned all the surfaces to be glued: the bridge, the top where it would sit, the neck heel and the portion of the guitar where it would stick.

First, I glued the neck back on and with some strategically placed wood pieces and clamps ensured that the joint would never come apart again. The major squeeze-out of the glue seen here

  

is not a bad thing. It shows that glue has reached everywhere and won’t let go. And it was nothing for a couple of wet paper towels. I left the neck clamped for two days to let the glue cure completely under pressure.

Next, it was the turn of the bridge. More glue, different clamps, more squeeze-out all around. More clean-up, another 48 hours. When I took off the clamps everything was dry and solid.

A dot of super glue in each of the holes I had drilled, sealed them and also helped hold the fret I had pulled out. The problem with the entire procedure is that even though the fret might be seated completely, it is seldom in line with the adjoining two frets. Either the replaced fret stands proud or is lower than the frets flanking it. So, a fret levelling, crowning and polishing was required and that is what I did for the next three-and-a-half hours!

  

I even lubed the fretboard and bridge and gave the entire guitar a good polish till it shone like new.

After that all that was left to do was to string ’er up and hear her sing. But I did put on lighter strings this time: .012” – .052”. The action was so low on it that I had to pull out the old saddle and put in a new, tall saddle. After putting in the new saddle, the action was still nice and low but without any string buzz.

Silly me…I got so happy seeing the action that I forgot to take a photograph! But she was a stunner, alright!

Black Beauty II (I have already dated Black Beauty – read earlier posts) was handed over in my care with the complaint of having an excruciatingly high action. I checked the usual culprits: the relief in the neck and whether the bridge was lifting. The bridge was, thankfully, stuck solid but the relief in the neck left a lot to be desired.

While inspecting the guitar – not a known name – a few things were highlighted. The plastic nut and saddle wouldn’t be doing any good to the sound of the instrument; the shoe-string tie of the guitar strap around the headstock was putting undue stress on the neck – it would have to go; the strings were dead – had been so since long; the hardware was all tarnished and a bit loose; and that the instrument in general was in need of real TLC (Bring out that vacuum cleaner, somebody)!

Also, the fretboard and bridge were dryer than tinder wood and the frets themselves were tarnished with minor pitting (indentations where strings struck the frets). As I inspected the guitar body, there was a chip on the outer extremity of the lower bout which exposed a bit of raw wood – probably caused by an accidental banging into something.

As I continued to go through the instrument under magnification and with a fine-tooth comb, I found the pickguard was lifting from the tip nearest to the fretboard. I pulled it off completely; the idea was to clean the pickguard and the area on the top where it was stuck, completely of the old glue and glue it back on.

If only things in practise were as easy as they appeared in theory! The glue around the periphery of the pickguard was dry and flaky. As I tried scraping it off, it left scratch marks like those when you scratch the painted side of a mirror: with light shining through! That being that I chucked the old pickguard and decided to put on a new one.

And then followed an unending experiment with solutions and solvents to take the drying glue off the top without harming the finish. Since you will screech in horror if I told you what finally worked, I won’t tell you! And a swanky new pickguard took the place of the old, cheap one.

 

Then I turned my attention to the hardware. With some magic lotion and lots of elbow grease the tuning machines shone like new.

I took off the shoe-string tie and prepared to install a proper strap-pin on the heel of the guitar. Drilling the hole to accept the screw of the strap-pin at that sweet spot is a tricky proposition. This one came out just fine.

Instinctively, I looked at the strap-pin at the bottom of the guitar. It was tarnished and beaten. So, I changed both, shiny and new.

Turning my attention to the fretboard, I scraped it clean, applied a double dose of nutrients – as also to the bridge – and recrowned and polished the frets. The end result was, indeed, pleasing to the eyes.

 

In earlier posts, I have failed to properly explain the process of replacing a plastic nut and saddle with bone elements. Let me set the record straight with this post.

First of all, what is the need to replace plastic parts? Plastic is cheap and easily available. Most guitar manufacturers (barring the biggest names in the business) put in the cheapest stuff possible to increase their profit margin – and that goes for everything that is your guitar – the wood, tuning machines, strings, nut and saddle. The plastic nut and saddle serve the purpose but when compared to bone, the volume and quality of sound is not even a patch.

This is due to the fact that bone is a denser material. Denser the material, greater will be the transfer of sound, and lesser the loss of sound while transferring from string to saddle/nut to bridge/neck.

After bone, a denser material is something called Tusq. It is synthetic but I won’t vouch for the quality of sound it produces. While I don’t like the sound from Tusq elements, for it lacks the mellow warmth of bone, many people do prefer it.

So…the plastic elements are taken out and bone elements put in. Hardly as easy as that! These bone elements are also mass produced and need to be customised to fit a particular instrument. For each instrument, the dimensions of these parts – like thickness and height – are different, which needs to be dialled in before these elements can work the best that they can with the instrument.

So, the nut was shaved down – both in height and thickness – as was the saddle.

Also, the nut slots had to be lowered to get the action on the guitar to an acceptable level. Once that was done, a carbon jelly was introduced in the slots so that the strings wouldn’t catch in the slots, while tuning up or down.

The angle that the strings make coming out of the bridge holes to the top of the saddle also has a big impact on the volume and quality of sound. With a tall saddle, strings can come straight out of the holes and the angle created is good, exerting a lot of pressure on the saddle, forcing it down into the bridge, which helps maxamise sound transfer and minimises loss of sound.

With a shaved-down saddle (to compensate for high action), the string slot has to be extended a bit so that that angle is created. The angle thus created, exerts pressure on the saddle, which, in turn, helps in a solid transfer of sound.

And finally, Black Beauty II’s coat was given a proper rubdown. See it gleam in health and happiness! Happy to see this beauty turn out the way it did!

If your remember, last time, I had said how the bridgeplate was a problem in this guitar. After much thought, I shaped two pieces of wood, stuck them together and then stuck and clamped them adjacent to the bridgeplate.

The idea was that this would only lend strength and support to the not-so-stout bridgeplate, helping hold the top of the guitar somewhat in place once the strings start pulling it up.

On a more expensive instrument, I would have suggested to the owner that a Platemate would be the way to go about it. A Platemate is a thin brass plate that is stuck to the bridgeplate and takes all the pull of the strings, protecting the bridgeplate.

Then came the turn of glueing and clamping the bridge itself.

The glue flows and moves into every nook and cranny, and once it cures, it forms a solid bond. But, in the process, the bridge holes also get filled with glue and get blocked so well that you can’t just poke through with bridgepins. The solution, then, is to open the holes using a drill and right-sized bit.

With the holes opened, and before strings came on, it was the right time to show a bit of love to the dried out fretboard. I had cleaned it earlier of all the gunk collected on it over its three-odd year life.

The fretboard scraped clean, the frets were crowned and polished and then the fretboard was given a drink of boiled linseed oil. So thirsty was the fretboard that the oil disappeared in minutes and I had to apply a second coat, which lent it a healthy sheen to the fretboard.

Then came the turn of putting in the saddle and the nut and setting up the guitar to play as perfectly as it should. Things to take into consideration is the gauge of strings used, the neck angle, etc. The nut requires a bit carbon grease in the slots for the strings to ride in them without getting stuck, or posing tuning issues.

The saddle needed a shave to get the action just right without any string buzz. An added consideration was that Snow White was an electro-acoustic beauty and thus, the under-saddle piezo pick-up had to be accommodated for.

That done, it was time to give the strings a stretch to get them used to the tension that they would be put under.

After stretching and tuning the strings a couple of times, it was finally turn to give the guitar body a good rubdown and polish.

Ain’t she a beauty?

This neatly finished guitar with abalone binding came in with the (apparent)complaint of a high action. It needed new strings too.

Simple enough? Spoken too soon!

As soon as I hear high action, my eyes automatically go to two places: the relief in the neck and whether the bridge is lifting under string tension.

And that was just the beginning of the list of woes ailing this pretty guitar. As I looked, I noticed that the spot where the ‘G’ string rode the saddle had been chewed into.

So, off came the strings and the saddle out of the bridge…not quite in one piece!

Then it was the turn of the bridge to come off completely; for the spot on the top where the bridge sat, to be cleaned thoroughly, and then for the bridge to be glued on, clamped and left undisturbed for at least 48 hours.

A few right-sized palette knives inserted in the right places helped pop off the bridge.

The bridge came off without much fuss but as it did, I saw clearly what I thought I had seen: a crack, or at least the beginnings of one, right along its centre.

Also, notice the bridge footprint on the top of the guitar. At least a millimetre or two was without glue. You can see it reflected in this next photograph of the bridge flipped over.

But as I looked at the bridge area on the top of the guitar, it seemed oddly misshapen. A simple ruler proved me right and that my eyes weren’t playing tricks.

And I knew that that could be caused only due to one problem: if the bridgeplate (a piece of wood stuck right under the bridge, whose job is to take most of the stress of the strings pulling up at the top and keep the top stable and straight) was weak, splintered or badly cut. Bridgeplates are particularly made out of hardwoods like rosewood, walnut, ebony and mahogany to take all that strain of the strings pulling up.

In this case, the bridgeplate was badly cut and made from silly wood. A bridgeplate made from ice-cream sticks would have provided greater support! Here is what I saw inside:

The flat piece of wood with six holes in a row is what was masquerading as a bridgeplate. No wonder the poor top was in misery.

What followed was a hot-water bath for the bridge area on the top and then clamping it under a block of wood for 24 hours.

When I took off the clamps, there was hardly any difference. So, while I thought about another way around the problem, I began to work on other parts of the guitar.

First came the cleaning of the area of the top where the bridge would sit: cleaning it of old glue, lacquer (varnish) so that once glued, the bridge would sit tight and never budge from its place again. An Xacto knife and two bridgepins helped me mark the boundary of the bridge.

If you look closely at the last photograph, you will be able to see how much varnish needed to be taken off all around for bare (bridge) wood to be in complete contact with bare (top) wood.

We went to work with a chisel and a few grits of sandpaper. Just like this:

That cleaned, I went to work on the underside of the bridge itself. The cleaned up bridge presented another problem.

The crack that I saw on the top of the bridge and thought was only superficial, actually ran through the bridge.

Meanwhile, the fretboard had enough DNA on it to map the family tree of the owner; the frets needed crowning and polishing, and the tuning machines needed to be worked on too.

What I did with the bridgeplate and what were the hits and misses till I handed the guitar over to the owner: coming soon.

 

YES! I know I have written about how to go about choosing a guitar, but I am being forced to write about it again with a special focus on children, thanks largely due to the sudden flood of queries from parents.

FOR SMALLER CHILDREN

What size to buy

The ideal age to start learning any instrument would be six years, once the child has attained a degree of motor control. The ideal size for the child would be a smaller guitar – referred to in the guitar industry as a 3/4^th guitar. But there is a certain shelf life to the instrument because just as the child outgrows his/her shoes and jumpers, so will he/she outgrow the instrument too.

 

Not that he/she won’t be able to play the instrument but there are two scenarios here: a) either he/she is so comfortable with the small-sized instrument that he/she finds it rather cumbersome playing a regular-sized instrument, or, b) they are so cramped for room that they are terribly uncomfortable playing the small instrument.

So, the downside of buying a small instrument is that in the end IT HAS TO GO! It might adorn a wall but will be seldom played. If there is a younger sibling/cousin/friend the economics of buying a 3/4^th guitar work out that much better.

A word of caution though, A TOY GUITAR IS NOT A 3/4^th GUITAR!

What type – steel-string, nylon string or electric?

 

The steel-string guitar is more for accompaniment – to sing along to – while the nylon-string guitar is more a specialist classical music instrument, meant to sound finger-picked notes that make the basic melody of the song. It is ideal for Western Classical Music.

While the steel-string instrument is generally played with a pick or plectrum – never overruling the fingers – it is a SIN to even lay a pick or plectrum on a classical guitar, which is (or should be) played only by the fingers.

 

There are basic differences in how the steel-string and the nylon-string guitars are constructed, which dictate the way each is played.

The sound thus produced from a steel-string guitar is happier and peppier, while the sound of the classical guitar is softer, mellower, meant to be consumed personally.

The electric guitar has its own image, personality and points to consider.

 

In the end, choosing a guitar is for you and the child to decide together.

What price range?

This is something that I leave parents and guardians to decide, for it is they who will have to shell out the moolah. It is not wise to buy a really cheap, or a really expensive guitar; for the simple reason that a cheap instrument may not last your child’s childhood!

Also, it is likely to put off your youngster for various reasons like comfort, sound quality, etc, etc. Never, think that your brat won’t know the difference. They’re into YouTube as much as they are into Cola, and they listen to stuff!

Expensive stuff: not worth it, for, in the end IT HAS TO GO!

It is then wise to walk the middle line and try and find the best instrument that you possibly can in the middle range.

FOR CHILDREN 11 YEARS OR OLDER

Full size! No question about it. Children this age have grown enough to be able to handle a full-size guitar. If they are facing a bit of a problem forming and holding chords, it will disappear within a few months as their hands dial in the ‘stretch’ required to hold chords and shapes.

The more they practise, the more they will acclimatise to the instrument, the sooner their playing will become ‘clean’ (chords and notes ringing out clear).

And if it wasn’t evident from these couple of paragraphs at which age the switch from a 3/4^th to a full-size guitar should be made, it is age 11!

And since it is a full-size guitar that you are looking to buy, all the recommendations I made in the earlier piece, become considerations.
Read that piece here:

Choosing a guitar

Happy New Year, good people (even you baddies!)!!
May all of you have the best year yet!
My New Year resolution: not to miss my date with the Lucknow Guitar Garage, ever again!!

But without ado, let’s talk about saddles and their slots. But first…