What IS a Guitar Setup, St Pete?
Some guitar techs think it’s just a truss rod and saddle height adjustment. Some may “throw in” intonation adjustments and some lube and polish.
But Hank’s professional guitar techs don’t think like that. We think you’re trusting us with your prized guitar to ensure that everything about the instrument is made to feel, sound and play in a way that will delight you.
Nuts!
Yes, that’s a lot of extra work. Take just the nut, for instance. That’s the little thing up near the headstock with slots to guide your strings to their respective tuner keys.
If the slots are too low, you’ll not get all the tone and sustain your guitar is capable of. If they’re too high, you’re going to play sharp in the “cowboy frets”. Neither of those optiions are good, yet they could be bugging you right now and you may not realize it.
Many techs (and nearly all nut makers) don’t know that to make tuning easier and more stable, you need to angle the slots toward the tuner keys, then slightly round the back edges. Instead, they may offer lubricant – graphite or some sort of grease, which of course will quickly wear off – if you’re lucky, before it attracts dirt and grime!
If they only knew how to properly file a nut, they wouldn’t have to resort to such nonsense!
Ever been tuning a string – turn the tuner and nothing seems to happen, then suddenly, “Zing!” now it’s sharp? That’s because the last tech didn’t do this!
– EXPERIENCED TECH
You may just be thinking that some other guitar – maybe someone elses, sounds or plays a bit better than your, and maybe it’s the make of the guitar, or the model.
Nah! The name on the headstock has little to nothing to do with its sound or playability, regardless of what the Badvertisers tell you! It’s all in the setup – really!
But guitar manufacturers have a bigger ad budget than us hard-working guitar techs, so the word about setups doesn’t get out like it should. And there’s the thing about not all setups being equal!
Don’t Fret!
Don’t even get me started about frets! Jeeze Louise, those are a lot of work. But if your tech really cares about your guitar, it’s gotta be done. Most guitars have twenty-one or more of the little buggers, and they can be onery!
The average new guitar, right outta the box or off the shelf, comes with four to eight high frets (at no extra charge!).
Inexperienced techs, if they bother with frets at all, will just have a go at leveling those frets and you know what? They’ll make your frets even worse! Why? Because most factory high frets are due to loose frets or loose fret ends. When you try to file them down, they just “duck down” and your good frets get filed! (And that ain’t no “good”!)
Your friendly, experienced St Pete guitar techs (actually in Clearwater), know better. We’ll re-seat those loose frets and re-glue where necessary before leveling frets.
That Ain’t All!
Yeah, I could go on and on at the more than twenty issues we cover when we setup your guitars, but this is just supposed to be a web article, not a novel.
If you bring your guitar(s) (or banjo, uke, bass, violine, cello, etc.) into our shop just a tad north of St Pete, we’ll show you what it needs (if anything); what it will cost and how long it will take (usually 5 to 10 days), in less than five minutes – at no cost at all!
That goes double if it’s been more than a year since your last guitar setup. Did you know you could do permanent damage to your guitar if it doesn’t get regular maintenance?
So drop by Hank’s Gutiar Shop – St Pete’s favorite guitar shop – and say “Hi” to Hank, Liam, Cole and Chase. We’ll take great care of your axe and have it playing better than new!