Why Set Up a Guitar

Series Summary

Guitar maintenance is necessary for the proper care of your stringed instrument. Guitar technicians perform maintenance duties for traveling artists such as tuning, stringing and set-up. There are different technicians who perform varying duties depending on the instrument. Guitar maintenance depends on the set-up of the guitar. If your instrument is to be played for a large audience, it may be plugged into an amplifier and speaker system that will project the sound. Thusly, levels and volumes are adjusted to produce the appropriate sound as well as effects and pedals.

In this series of informative videos, you will learn about guitar maintenance and set up. Watch as our expert demonstrates the use of varying guitar maintenance tools such as a tuner. Learn how to adjust the neck, use a capo and string an acoustic guitar. Learn how to adjust intonation and make neck adjustments on an electric guitar. Get expert tips on changing the strings on a classical guitar, tremolo or whammy bar. Learn about the basic maintenance duties needed to keep your guitar in perfect shape as well as the steps for setting up a guitar and adjusting pickups.

Video Transcript

"Hello, today we're going to talk about setting up your electric guitar. Now, what is a setup of an electric guitar? Setup is basically adjusting two major things with your guitar. One, the height of the strings above the fret board, or what?s called action. And the intonation which has to do with the proper pitch being sounded as you play all the way up the neck. The higher the action is on the guitar and the more uneven that action is on the guitar, the more likely that your guitar will start sounding out of tune as you start playing higher and higher up the neck. I'll explain a little later why that's so, but for the time being just recognize that setting those two things up is the proper way to get your guitar to sound right and to play easily. Action is basically setting the string height above the Frets so that it's an even and easy playing distance all the way up the neck. There's a lot of variables that are involved and in the next segment we'll talk about all of the variable that go into creating good action and proper intonation."