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Old 11-12-2010, 08:32 AM   #9
Chris_P_Critter
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bezmotivnik View Post
I've been working on electric guitars and basses for almost forty-five years, and used to swap setup and maintenance tips with Dan Erlewine (who is a wonderful guy, BTW). At the moment, I own or have in route sixty (I believe!) personal guitars and basses of all sorts.

I may not be a fantastic player, but I know gear.

A few comments on setup and tuning and the misnomer, "setting intonation." Man, I hardly know where to start...

Well, randomly, here goes!

Take setup and "intonation" advice you hear on guitar forums with a grain of salt or disregard it completely, because 95%+ of these people simply have no clue. Real guitar pros who know what they're talking about leave within days. Dan lasted about two weeks when he tried to give advice on a major forum. Guitar forums are almost entirely about wannabees pooling their ignorance and aggressively institutionalizing it as unthinking peer group dogma. They resist new and better data with great hostility...largely because, well, they're stupid.

Avoid self-ordained "guitar techs" who offer instant "While-U-Wait" setups at fixed fees. My local Guitar Center had a big event where you could drag your guitar in and have it "professionally set up" on the spot for $20. Quick and dirty setups like this have about a 50/50 chance of improving or worsening a guitar, but they're never complete nor correct. A setup done right takes time and has to be rechecked after a couple of days after the adjustments, particularly to the neck, have had time to "settle." A pretty large majority of "guitar techs" I've encountered didn't know what they were doing and were duffers learning (if at all) on other people's gear as they went along and charging them for it.

Your guitar will NEVER be "intonated" or even "in tune." Jack Endino did a great little article about the sheer impossibility of the recorded guitar ever being "in tune," even if there was any actual agreement on what "in tune" even is, and there isn't. There are wide opinions on the proper temperament for guitar, and the played note does not have stable pitch in any case. To the extent "intonation" means anything at all, it means that all the notes you actually play sound more or less correct by your definition of on-pitch. And good luck on even getting that much in the ballpark. Fooling around with the 12th fret and its harmonic and adjusting the saddle to that is only an approximation, a starting point. In itself it means nothing. THE SINGLE BIGGEST TUNING PROBLEM IS THE NUT, particularly at the big E string, which is grossly mis-cut on probably a majority of the new production guitars I'm seeing at any price point short of Custom Shop. Pre-cut nuts are becoming the rule, and they are a scandal. The problem is that the big E, especially, cannot handle the break angle. The nut is not ramping the string properly and is levering it up at the back of the slot, which becomes the witness point rather than the front face of the slot where it is supposed to be and must be for the string to tune properly.

The above problem is extremely easy to diagnose and I'm amazed so few people notice it, including all these shake and bake "guitar techs"...but they don't because they have become idiotically hypnotized by electronic tuners and fiddling with 12th fret intonation at the expense of developing a good ear for finding bad notes.

OK, if you have "intonated" your guitar and have the open E "in tune," play the F, F# and G. Are they "in tune"? If so, cool. Are they decreasingly sharp as you go up the scale? You have this problem, and it's probably going to require expert nut work. Check the other strings as well. Until this is repaired, the whole string is off, just as if you'd backed a saddle 1/8" out of place. One of your two critical witness points is not where it should be.

I'm seeing this on brand new $2000 US Fenders (for example) as well as on cheap imports.

That's enough for now. In the next installment, maybe we can get to the grosser misconceptions about shielding.
This is awesome. For someone like me just starting to learn how to do guitar setups, this is really good to know. It's not rocket science to me - but knowing all of the nuances and how they interplay with other parts of the guitar is really useful information.
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