Whoever designed electric guitars is a sadist.
Or the knowledge for how to maintain them is reserved for an exclusive club because it’s damn hard to find the right information. They don’t come with instructions, you’re just supposed to know what to do.
Yesterday, i was in one of those bored moods where you end up doing something unnecessary just to pass the time. Even though my guitar didn’t need its strings changing I was kinda intrigued as to whether I could do it.
The bit where the strings are attached at the bottom of the guitar (on the main bit) is called the bridge, and I was starring at that thing for ages trying to work out how the string was attached and how you get at it.
It wasn’t until I found a video on you tube where I guy steps through the process that I discovered that the strings thread through right from holes on the base of the guitar and poke through the bridge like the nose of a hungry mouse (if a mouse had a wire as a nose). A bullet shaped affair is stuck to one end of the string to stop it in place.
There’s also a trick to winding it around the peg affairs on the head involving leaving some slack and then sort of tucking the string under itself before winding the key.
But then after all this mad time it took me to attach the new lot of strings it was an absolute nightmare tuning the back up. NI Guitar Rig has a tuner built in, showing you how far off a note it is. But when I got the strings to the correct notes they still somehow felt a bit too slack to me, so then I was all confused wondering if they needed to be an octave higher, so I end up probably way way over tightening them and probably damaging both the strings and the pegs. So maybe they weren’t slack at all and it was just that I’d been learning for such a short time that it was too easy for me to forget how they should feel.
Even as I tuned them all though, they kept going out of tune again after just a few strums. Found a tit-bit (you know, the other day I discovered that us english write tit-bit but americans write tid-bit, as if tit is too rude) on fenders site suggesting that you tune it up, tug on the strings a bit, tune it up again and repeat the process a whole lot of times until it because stable.
Again, nothing with the guitar tells you this shit.
But then, even after getting the strings on and tuning them, I was convinced that the low E was rattling more than it did before. So I search for information on what could be the problem and there are 50′000 possible reasons, all incredibly technical.
It could be the pegs (maybe I did damage them after-all?), or the height of the string from the bridge, or the curvature of the kneck, or the pickups are too close and creating a magnetic field. But adjust these and you may affect the intonation so there are further adjustments. The list is endless.
To adjust the height you stick a very thin allan key into the saddles, which are the individual teeth looking bits of metal on the bridge, one for each string. But check this juicy guide from fenders site.
Players with a light touch can get away with lower action; others need higher action to avoid rattles. First, check tuning. Using a 6″ (150 mm) ruler, measure the distance between bottom of strings and top of the 17th fret. Adjust bridge saddles to the height according to the chart, then re-tune. Experiment with the height until the desired sound and feel is achieved.
Note: For locking tremolo systems, the individual string height is preset. Use the two pivot adjustment screws to achieve the desired overall string height.
| Neck Radius |
String HeightBass Side |
Treble Side |
| 7.25″9.5″ to 12″15″ to 17″ |
5/64″ (2 mm)4/64″ (1.6 mm)4/64″ (1.6 mm) |
4/64″ (1.6 mm)4/64″ (1.6 mm)3/64″ (1.2 mm) |
Whaaa? Nothing there made any sense to me, and nothing I measured resulted in anything in the bull-park shown in that table (which didn’t c+p very well and I can’t be bothered to fix it). Must have read it a hundred times. Also, am I supposed to know what kind of bridge I have? No-one and nothing with the guitar told me, there are fixed bridges, vintage tremolos, floyd rose tremolos. I think mine must be vintage tremolo, or standard tremolo or something.
The kneck looks straight to me, so I don’t think theres any problem there, but if there was, there is apparently a truss-rod in there that you can rotate and cause the wood to creak and arch a bit. Gosh.
The other day the beeb displayed on our video display devices the panarama episode about scientology.