Adjusting Guitar Nut Slots

Video Transcript

"Now lets take a look at the nut itself. You can see on this nut that the saddles, or that the slots themselves are all different sizes and they're different depths, depends on the radius of the neck itself. You'll notice that on this instrument, when I designed it, I have this saddle so that it's lower over here, and it grows higher over here, and it retains the radius that the neck has; this particular instrument has a twelve inch radius on the neck. But it's lower here than it is here, and the reason for that is, because I'm compensating for the thickness of the strings themselves. Each of these strings has the same height above the neck, at this point because of the angle. Now sometimes you'll run into a nut that's problematic. This one here for example, doesn't have a radius. It's a flat nut across the top, and this one here fits lower than this one, this one is a little high and this one is a little low. We've already adjusted the height this way on this particular nut, and these particular strings, this one would be a problem typically, because it looks like it's to deep. Ideally, what we want on a nut, if that's the radius we want the size of these to be exactly one half of the size of the varying strings, each of the strings being a different height. We want this nut slot to be half the thickness of the string itself, and to be the same radius as the string. That's an ideally cut nut. And the way to approach that is with a nut slotting file, such as this made for each of the different sizes. Or if you're very good you can use a round file, a round needle file. Notice that it tapers, so you can do this part, using this part of the file, and this part using this part of the file."