Professional Guitar Setup Course

Introduction

The Pro Guitar Setup course is designed for up to 6 people and the aim is to teach the art of setting up both electric and acoustic guitars with confidence. The course is both theory and practical, we discuss all the setup points and how to adjust the guitar to get the best setup out of it, we use a Gibson Les Paul and a Stratocaster to demonstrate all of these points. Not only do we discuss and show you how to adjust the finer points but we also discuss and show how to maintain your instrument, covering fretboard treatment and fret polishing.

Who is the course for?

The course is designed for all levels from the complete beginner looking to get the best setup out of their guitar to working techs who want to brush up or who are broadening their skills. We are confident that you will leave with the knowledge and awareness to setup your own guitars and having had the practical application of this new found knowledge, the confidence, which is often lacking with the majority of people to maintain their instruments.

What will you learn?

Theory

• Measure & Adjust Neck Relief: Detailed theory & practise.
• Action heights: Correct Height, adjustments & discussion
• Radius the Bridge Saddles
• Floating Bridges: Balancing & Setting up
• Intonation: Adjusting Intonation
• Fretboard cleaning
• Fret Polishing
• Electrics: Maintaining the Pots and checking the electrics
• Schematics
• Pickup Heights
• Re-Stringing: Gauges & how to string correctly
• Cleaning: Different finishes and how best to clean

Practical

We then move on to putting these points in action starting with;

How to assess the guitar with mind to all of the points, this is so key to gaining confidence and certainty, knowing the points to start with enables you to adjust safe in the knowledge that if you go too far with the neck relief you have a starting point and using certain increments you can be sure of how much adjustment you are making, it seems to be a common problem with people adjusting their own neck, not knowing a starting point and it is the very first thing that we check when setting up guitars..

The most important point is how much Relief is in the neck, this is measured using a Notched Straight edge for greater accuracy. We will also show you how to assess the neck relief by eye, this enables you to easily determine the relief in the neck without the use of any specific tools. Once the relief is measured we check the Action height at the 12th fret as well as at the 1st fret, this gives us a good picture of how the guitar is setup currently.

With the Pro Guitar Setup Points that we give you, we are then able to look at where the guitar needs some work and then put that into action. Getting the balance between the neck relief and action heights is key to a good setup, with the guitar adjusted to where we want it we then go onto the maintenance part of the setting up.

Personal attention

The course does have a set agenda but we often meander around topics and are happy to do so, most of us have had many different guitars and they nearly always have some curious tales and they are always good to discuss as they will bring up certain points about setup which will add to the discussion and possibly unraveling the complexity that is often misunderstood in getting your guitar setup right