How to Adjust the Truss Rod on a Bass Guitar

Series Summary

Does your bass guitar hurt your fingers when you play? Does your hand get tired quickly? Do you feel like your bass guitar is never in tune, no matter what you do? If these things are problems, then there may be something wrong your bass guitar's intonation. Adjusting a guitar's intonation properly will alter and improve the action of the guitar (the distance between the neck and the strings) and make sure the guitar stays in tune all the way up the neck. The bass guitar setup and intonation is an important step in getting the best sound out of your guitar.

In this free video series, watch as guitar technician The Ferret teaches how to setup a Fender bass guitar. Learn how to adjust the truss rod, the bridge saddle, the pickup height, and the intonation. Improve the sound, intonation, and play-ability of your bass guitar with the help of the experts at ExpertVillage.

Video Transcript

"THE FERRET: This is the Fender Precision Bass, which is pretty much the industry standard. It's pretty stripped down to mostly the basics. You got one pickup, one volume, one tone control, bridge with adjustable saddles, and the truss rod adjustment is right up here at the end of the neck. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to check the neck because we can't really intonate it and do the action until we know the neck is straight. So what you want to do is you want to sight the neck from the end of the headstock looking down the edge of the fretboard and what we're looking for is to see that if the neck is straight or not, or if it has a hump in it, or if it's bowed. I'm looking at this neck right now; it looks like it is actually bowed, and that means that it's kind of got a flex in it like that. So what we need to do is we need to bring that up so it's flat. What we do is we use the right size Allen wrench, which just goes right in the hole here. And once we know it's in place, we're going to give it about a quarter turn to the right, which is going to make the fretboard come up to a flat plane. And there's a lot of string tension on this neck, so it's going to need another quarter turn, and sometimes you might have to loosen the string to get that wrench over where it needs to be. There we go. One more quarter turn. It's starting to look nice and straight. You want to look at both sides to the neck 'cause sometimes, you'll get a little bit different reaction from one side or the other. And this is looking pretty good, maybe just a little bit more, and then we're going to tune it back up to pitch and check the neck again."