On some guitars the truss rod is difficult to access. Truss rod adjustment: Some require a screwdriver others require a hex wrench. Several of the adjustments we described above may be too challenging for a beginner.
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Which adjustments may require professional setup? The Alvarez RU22C is the best ukulele for beginners because it has great sound and styling, and its concert-size body is good for kids and adults alike. Also, in our experience, nearly all of the ones we’ve tested played pretty well out of the box.
Setup isn’t as critical with ukes because they’re rarely played above the seventh fret, and almost none of them offer the adjustments we’ve described here. Smoothing is usually done with steel wool, although playing a new instrument for a few weeks may get the job done.Īt this point you may be curious about why we haven’t mentioned ukuleles, since we have a guide on them and they’re similar in many ways to guitars. This is also true of older guitars that may have irregularly worn frets. If one fret is slightly out of place, it could rub against your fingers when you’re playing or create a buzz when you’re playing certain notes or chords. But it can sometimes be necessary to smooth rough frets and otherwise ensure that they’re all uniform.
This isn’t as easy to adjust (something we’ll discuss in the next section).įrets and fretboard: With any luck a new guitar or bass won’t need much work on the frets (the metal bars across the neck) or the fretboard (the rest of the neck’s front side). Getting this right is obviously very important.Īcoustic guitars typically don’t have the bridge adjustments of their electric counterparts, instead having a saddle that is similar to the nut at the top of the neck. To give an exaggerated example of poor intonation, you might tune the open string to E, but when you played the 12th fret, it would be an E flat instead. Without proper intonation your guitar would measure in tune on your tuner, sound fine with most chords, but then sound off the higher up the neck you played. String length adjusts intonation, which refers to how in tune the notes are along the entire fingerboard, not just an open string. The bridges on most electric guitars and basses offer as many as three adjustments: global string height, individual string height, and string length. Depending on the guitar’s design, the strings could end here, or they could pass through the body or to a separate tailpiece. Making adjustments to the nut requires physical alterations through filing, and changes can’t be undone without replacing the nut.īridge: The bridge is the nut’s counterpart at the other end of the strings. The nut, along with the bridge, at the other end, offers per-string adjustments to height, compared with the “global” adjustment of the truss rod. It keeps the strings in place, both horizontally and vertically off the fretboard. Nut: At the top of the neck, after the strings leave the tuners, there’s a thin piece of (usually off-white) material over which the strings lie. Adjusting the truss rod essentially raises or lowers the strings on the midsection of the fretboard by adjusting how much curve, or relief, the neck has. If this were an archer’s bow, the truss rod would be the bow and the strings would be, well, the string. The truss rod is a strong metal rod located inside the neck of most modern guitars and basses that counteracts the tension created by the strings. If it’s too low, the strings can buzz at certain frets. Truss rod: The truss rod affects the guitar’s string height, or “action.” If the action is too high, the instrument can be hard to play. Some adjustments can be done by a beginner, but others require expertise or special equipment-or both. Multiple adjustments are covered under the broad term “setup,” and not all of them may be necessary for your particular instrument. That means no buzzes on any string at any fret, the same intonation accuracy across the whole fretboard, and string height that’s correct for your specific playing style (for most beginners, this typically means “low”), among other things. The goal of setup is to make sure a new guitar or bass sounds and plays its best, or to get your longtime favorite playing as well as it did the day you bought it. Guitars and basses are largely wooden instruments under tension from strong metal strings, and they must balance these forces to remain in tune and play properly. What does it mean to set up a guitar or bass? But is it necessary to pay someone (either at the time of purchase or well into the life of an instrument) to set it up for you, or is it okay to do it yourself? Basic setup and maintenance are crucial for a guitar or bass to sound and play its best, even if you’re just starting out. If your brand-new or years-old guitar sounds off, it might not be your playing.
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