Afternoon,
Just bought a new Yamaha Pacifica guitar; my first electric.
Does it need setting up?
What should the string action be measured at?
Other than strings is there anything else I need setting up?
Ive not measured but it feels like it has high action but when I compare it with one of my acoustics it doesnāt feel much different at all and those I have had setup.
Can it be correct out of the box or do they always need tweaking?
Thanks
Yup you definitely should have a set up. String action on your electric guitar is not like an acoustic. Acoustic guitar will have a higher action and I have a fender strat and itās set up at the 12 fret .050. Also is it a floating bridge or you using tremolo. There is a lot of set up on the bottom end . Also does the nut end need to be slotted for the top end of the neck.
Hi James, nice to meet you. Reference setups, your new guitar will or should come to you set up in the ballpark, and because all players are different, you will and should have a setup that suits you. If youāre handy and tech-ish. It is great to learn this skill for yourself; it helps you understand your guitar and saves you money, and it is also satisfying. Electric guitars are easier to set up than acoustics. For example, you can return your electric guitar to what it was very easily, with the acoustic, itās a bit of a faff. You will have somebody local, and a setup can be cheap if you get the right guy. A professional setup can cost about Ā£100. Hope this helps, cheers Hec
Itās worth while to look at a few youtube videos and learn how to do the basics of a setup. Itās not hard to do it yourself, even if all you do is adjust the truss rod. It doesnāt have to be perfect, you just want a guitar which is comfortable to play.
I canāt believe Iāve been playing for around 15 months and pretty much everything you said has just gone straight over my head!
No idea what any of that means but Iāll take the advice of you guys and take it for a setup.
Do I just ask the luthier to set it up and he will know what Iām asking for or do I have toā¦ I donāt knowā¦ Provide anythingā¦measurements or anything.
have a look at a few of these videos to get an idea of whatās involved Set Up Your Electric Guitar | JustinGuitar.com
Yea just take to a good guitar store and let them set it up. Do you plan on using this guitar hard tail or floating for the wammi bar?
as a begibner I recommend to go see a luthier first ! you can ask him for advice for later if you wanna learn to do it yourself
I donāt know what that means?
I want to play some rock tunes āOasis for egā and some pink Floyd.
The ultimate goal is the comfortably numb solos.
Hard tail is when your bridge is laying solid on guitar and floating is when the bridge basically suspended and you can use a bar that you push on for making dives in nots like a lot of 80s rock style like Van Halen
But it sounds to me you want hardtail set up
Hi James
What they are referring to is what sort of songs and solos you will be playing, and how this will affect the guitar setup.
If you are going to play solos with lot of bends, like Jimi Hendrix or David Gilmore for example, then if bending the strings with your fingers if the bridge (the part the strings are fixed to on the body) thuebridge is not rigid but is floating type then when you bend the strings it can be difficult to get the bend in tune because the bridge being floating will move little due to the extra tension on the string from the action of bending it. A way to get round this is to lock or block the floating bridge under it to stop it moving. When I say lock the bridge some floating bridge can be locked off to make them fixed, I do not know what your Yamaha has.
I hope the helps, by the way I am not sure but I think Gilmore uses the tremolo arm on some songs but not many I think.
Newb with a bit of setup experience writing here:
Get first hand reviews of any luthier you choose (good first hand reviews, that is)
Donāt be shy about spending money ā as āClick & Clackā used to intone at the end of every Car Talk show:
Itās the cheap man who pays the most
MY BAD LUTHIER EXPERIENCE
I inherited a 90 year old Gibson.
The old guitar was pretty rugged, so I cast about for a luthier with good reviews ā and settled on one of the largest shops in Maine, reading that others thought it was good too (foreshadowing: I mistook the sales reviews for luthier reviews) and drove the 4 hours round trip (twice).
They refretted it, and ātuned itā ā and did an utter crap job: it buzzed, had incredibly high/incredibly low action, and the fret board had highs and lows, the banding wasnāt fixed- so I sucked up the $540 charge and feared having them touch it again.
MY GOOD LUTHIER EXPERIENCES:
For my new Yamaha, I asked my guitar teacher for a recommendation and took it to the luthier they use. It was a one man shop that looked sketchy, but did good work. The barred F chord, rarely attainable for this newb, was suddenly attainable on the setup guitar.
For the Gibson (round 2), I took it to a very high end luthier. They walked through everything they found, estimated, accurately, what issues were (āOh, we get a fair number of instruments who first went toā my luthier of unhappy experience).
They were not inexpensive, but the end result is superior: nut was shimmed, floating bridge reshaped to sit properly, banding fixed, undulating frets evened, more appropriate strings for a newb added, action to spec at every fret.
It is eminently more enoyable to play. Woodsound Studio, in Rockland, Maine.
My advice:
Cheers,
Bruce
Definitely get it set up.
Also ask for details on exactly what they will check and adjust.
Iām pretty sure when I took my Epiphone (I bought it used, but it was not heavily used) for a setup at the local Guitar Center, all they did was change the strings and adjust action and intonation. Which was fine. But the truss rod needed adjusting and I donāt think they touched it. And the pickups needed adjusting and I donāt think they bothered to look. And because of the truss rod needing adjusting, in particular, the bridge height needed adjusting after adjusting the truss rod.
They werenāt things I noticed when I first got that guitar. But as I started exploring more of the neck as well as string bends, I noticed some issues. I started researching those issues and setup procedures and stuff and traced it back to what I needed to address.
Itās also worthwhile to check the guitar for level frets. I get a lot of guitar service videos (especially after I started researching how to do my own) and Iāve seen quite a few shared by luthiers illustrating how variable new guitars can be on that front. I checked mine for level frets and it seems good enough that I felt I didnāt need to do anything about that. Whether that would meet the standards of a good luthier, I dunno.
I found a really good luthier very close to my house. He builds guitars that start at $6,000 and a 2yr wait list but does service work to help round things out and provide a more consistent paycheck. Heās become the guy Iāll visit for more serious issues for sure. Iād trust him with just about anything structural in an instrument. If I wanted a really good and detailed setup with fret work, heās the guy Iād also visit. But Iāve taught myself enough basics that I feel like I donāt need to visit a luthier for that kind of thing.
Thanks all,
Dropped off at the guitar shop now.
Appreciate all the advice.
Regards
Can you stick to the plain forum fonts. This is so unnecessary.
@LievenDV I remember you used to tidy these things up for consistent appearance.
Let us know how it feels when it comes Zack from the luthier.
I did a day with a guitar tech and the very simplest thing he showed me was to press with the little finger of each hand on fret 1 and fret 22, reach as far into the middle of the fretboard with your thumbs and tap down on the strings. In a guitar that has a nice setup there should only be a minimal amount of movement when your thumbs tap down to those middle frets ( the tech guy demonstrated the sound to listen for which is hard to put in words).
While this method is a bit approximate, it requires no tools and gives me a good idea of whether itās worth spending money on a setup or not.
My advice would be to see if you can find a local guitar tech who offers similar courses. A day or half day of basic guitar setup. Consider it money invested. I can now do at least the basics on my guitars now to get them in the right ball park. I did a truss rod adjustment the other day on my 335 that has improved it greatly
Beg to respectfully disagree? If youāre referring to the fancy headers for the three main sections (god and bad experience, and advice), I myself found that the extra formatting around the sections made it clearer and more enjoyable to read.
Absolutely necessary? No.
Useful? Sure, yes!
Unnecessary? Donāt think so.
Cheers mate!
I beg to respectfully disagree. You can make a post easy to read and structured without all the changes in font size etc. I find it makes the post and ultimately the topic look messy. There is probably goodness to be read from the post but the presentation kind of puts me off reading it which is a shame.