Adjusting Electric Guitar Intonation

Video Transcript

"The second major component having to do with a proper setup of an electric guitar is setting the intonation. Intonation has to do with the correct pitch of the notes all the way up the neck. Why the pitch changes is because every time you press a string down on your guitar, you're actually stretching the string, changing its length. When you change its length, you effect the pitch, because the pitch is a, is completely dependent upon the length of the string. Now even though this may be a very minor amount, it's enough to throw the pitch accuracy off. And the higher the action is above the frets, the more of that stretch occurs and the less accurate the sound is. It becomes even more critical if the guitar is improperly set up as this one has been done, has been made improperly set up specifically for this demonstration, by having a neck angle that is too high. In other words, if you can zoom in on this, you can see that the height of the strings above the frets at this point is significantly higher than the height of the strings above the neck at this point. So, the higher up the neck you go the more stretching occurs. The more the sound and the pitch becomes inaccurate. So, there's two ways that we can adjust for the intonation to correct for that. One is adjusting the neck angle. The second is adjusting the intonation based upon the third factor, which is the thickness of the strings itself."