Final Setup of a Homemade Electric Guitar

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Frank Pope, FBI Guitars and I'm here on behalf of Expert Village to give you some tips on how to build your own guitar. I'm going to talk to you about the final set up of your guitar. You've been able to get the strings on it and you want to check the height at the nut. You want to see how high the strings are above the frets at the nut. The ideal height that I find for most players that are professional is that if you push the string down behind the second fret and then you file these slots down so that there is a half a string width height above this first fret. In other words, when you push the string down near the second fret, you should just barely have space between the string and this first fret. If you go through each of the strings and you do that the string height will be low in the first fret, but it will not buzz. You will be able to lower the action all the way down the neck. Once you've done that then you'll need to turn your attention to, setting the intonation. We talked about, because these strings are going to be under tension as you push on them this scale length is not going to be exact. You are going to need to make adjustments. You do this by moving these saddles forwards and backwards. Ideally what you want to do is to be able to check it. In other words, if you chime the string at the 12th fret and then you push it down and strike the note as well, they should be identical. You can double check that by coming up to the 17th fret and hitting a chime there and again the string should be exactly the same note when pushed down. If you can't make those two be exactly the same then you need to even out the difference. Now that you've checked the intonation on your guitar, you've set the height at the nut, you've tuned it all up; there is nothing left to do but to try it out. Good luck. I hope yours turns out."