Guitar Intonation

When you tune your guitar, how do you do it? You use a tuner and tune the strings so that the open notes become E-A-D-G-B-E (Standard Tuning). But after tuning have you ever checked if the 12th fret of the 1st string is also an E note? Or the 8th fret of the second string is a G note? NO? Why?

You may be thinking that when I have already tuned the open strings, then automatically, every fret gets tuned. This thing only applies when your guitar's intonation is correct. But check it once if it is really correct or there is some alteration to it. 

If there is any alteration, do not panic, it has a solution. If your twelfth fret sounds higher than E note, then you need to increase the length of the string. If it sounds flatter than an E note, you need to shorten the length of the string. Now how to do it? Electric guitar bridges do have this option to change the length of each individual string. On acoustic guitar it is a little bit difficult to do.

This is the bridge of an electric guitar. If you notice, you will find some nuts provided in the bridge. These nuts are meant for adjusting the length of strings from nut to bridge. The picture is self explanatory and now you must have got the idea how to do it.

This is the saddle of an acoustic guitar. You need to adjust its height to change the length. If you need to increase the length, lift the saddle up and increase its height. Do the opposite for decreasing the length of the string.

This is a floating bridge. Do you notice a black circle? That nut can be opened using an Allen Key. When you loose that nut, you can adjust the length of that particular string by moving the string holder and then again tighten that nut to fix it. 

Changing Strings

Changing strings on the guitar is a very crucial part of maintaining your guitar. There are few things that should be kept in the mind while doing so.

When you are buying strings, please buy a whole new set. Do not buy one or two piece. Also, when one string breaks while playing, change the whole set, not only the broken string. But if you are running out of money, do as affordable. If you change one or two strings and keep some old strings in your guitar, there will be an imbalance in brightness of sound coming form the strings and you will not be able to get the best tone out of your lovely instrument.

The next thing is, whatever brand you prefer to buy, go for it, but always remember to buy strings of the same gauge as your old guitar strings have. If you buy a different gauge set, your guitar neck will bend and you will be facing either fret buzz or higher action. If you are intentionally changing the gauge, do not forget to adjust the truss rod of your guitar. It will balance the new tension of the strings and will save your guitar neck from bending.

Now, when you change the strings, prefer to change one at a time. Do not take out all the six strings. Take out one string at a time and replace it with the new one. Proceed like this for the other strings too.

Many of you face problems while changing strings on the floating bridge. Right? When you replace a string from a floating bridge, the angle of the bridge changes. Then you replace it with a new string and try to balance the tuning as well as the angle of the bridge. But I really don't know if you achieve it or not. The nightmare comes when you have to clean your fretboard and you need to take out all the strings together.

But here is an end to all of your problems. Before removing any string, just do as shown in the figure.

Just set the angle of the bridge at which you want it to be after changing the strings with the help of ice cream sticks or whatever alternative you have. Now you can change the strings as you do in a fixed bridge guitar. After tuning, remove the sticks. If there is a little bit of altering in the tuning, use the fine tuners to tune it again. And now you are ready to play! 

Body of the guitar

The body of the guitar can be seen in the figure below.

 It is different for an electric guitar and different for an acoustic guitar. The body of an acoustic guitar is hollow. The hollow dome is required so that the sound of the strings can accumulate their and pronounce itself to an easily audible level. When you strike the strings with a plectrum, the vibrations produced by the strings travels into the sound hole of the guitar body and strikes the inner surface of the guitar body in different directions. Some part of the vibrations is also absorbed by the body of the guitar itself and hence the guitar body also vibrates. The body of the guitar reflects the sound waves which combine together to produce an overall effect. As the whole mechanism of sound production in an acoustic guitar depends very much on the body of the guitar, one must be very careful with the type and quality of wood used for making it. I am not saying that rosewood is inferior than spruce. But each kind of wood has a different quality and hence each adds a different flavor to the notes you play. For example you will find that the spruce bodies produce brighter sound than the rosewood bodies. But the choice is yours. If you love brighter sound go for spruce body. For a little bit mellower quality as compared to spruce, go for rosewood. No one is superior; it’s just that each one has different applications. Beginners should not bother much on this. Both are good to them.

Moving on to the electric guitar bodies, you may find that they are made from alder, rosewood, basswood, maple and many more. In an electric guitar, the body wood does not affect the sound to any significant level. So the body wood does not matter much. It may matter when it comes to weight of the guitar, as lighter guitar bodies are easier to hold and hang on the shoulder. 

Guitar neck

Neck of the guitar is the only concerned part as far as playability is considered. Your hand is always lying on this part of the guitar when you play. Hence your hand feels only this part of the guitar 100 percent of the time. A bad neck may make a thousand dollar guitar totally unplayable as compared to a hundred dollar guitar. So, it is very necessary for everyone to know about the neck of the guitar and its components too. Look at the neck given below.

You can't see, but the neck has some hidden elements too. Inside the neck there is a truss rod running all along it. The purpose of this truss rod is to counter balance the tension generated by the six strings of the guitar. If the neck would have been only made from wood, then after sometime it would bend like a bow with its crest away from the strings. The truss rod acts as a support against the strings’ tension. The truss rod is adjustable and you can change the tension on the truss rod anytime. But be careful, over tensioning the truss rod may bend the neck in just opposite direction. So you need a perfect balance. There are different types and gauges of strings, so whenever you change the type or gauge of string, you need to adjust your truss rod.

Whenever the guitar neck is bowing away from the strings, you need to tighten the truss rod. Because it shows that the strings have more tension and the neck is unable to bear it. So you need to add tension to the truss rod so that the neck can be relieved. If the bow is towards the strings, then loosen up the truss rod a little bit.
Over the neck is the fingerboard or the fretboard. The frets may be directly fitted on the neck or in many cases you will find that an additional bit of wood is pasted on the neck. And on that board, the frets are fitted. Most necks are made up of maple wood. Maple is hard and hence a good candidate for neck of guitar. The fingerboards are generally made from three woods. Maple and rosewood are the most common. Ebony is the third one. Maple looks yellowish while rosewood is dark brown. Ebony is darkest of all.
You can know if there is a neck bow or not. Take any one string and press it at the first fret and the 20^th fret. Ideally the string should touch each and every fret running from one to twenty. But generally a small relief is given in the neck and hence there will be a very small gap (around 0.5 mm) around the twelfth fret.If there is a large gap or all the frets are being touched by the string, then there is a bow. And an immediate treatment is required. The bow in the instrument originates because of the following reasons:1.    Changing temperature of the surrounding.
2.    Changing moisture content in the surrounding air. (especially during rainy season)
3.    Adding different string gauges to the guitar.
4.    Changing the tuning of guitar. (Like E flat, C flat etc.)
To deal with the first two conditions, you only need to keep your guitar inside a safe cover. For the last two, you need to adjust the truss rod anyhow.
Another very important factor that the players face is bow development while changing the strings. Do not take out all the strings at once. Take out one string, then replace it with a new one, then take out the next one.

Guitar Strings

When you approach the market for guitar strings, you have a myriad of choices to get yourself confused unless you are very specific. There are so many brands to choose from and everyone has his or her own personal choices. Brands really matter a little bit only. What matters the most is the construction, material and gauge of the strings. As you would not want to dive into the technical aspects of the string making, let us leave the construction part. But let me talk something on the material used. The strings can be made from nylon, steel or they may be nickel wounded or copper wounded. There are few things that should be considered while buying a new set of strings. These are the tone, the durability, the feel, corrosion resistivity and erosive property.
The tone is directly related to the material used for making the strings. Steel strings are brighter than copper wound strings. The durability may be defined from two points of views. One is the durability of tone and the other is durability of the string. These really depend on the quality of make of the strings. But it also depends very much on how you take care of your strings. It is always advised to keep your strings clean and free from sweat and moisture. This will surely enhance the durability of the strings in terms of tone. The feel is decided by the gauge of the string that is being in use. The gauge is the thickness of the strings. Thinner strings are easy to grab and play but have thin tone as compared to higher gauge strings. But higher gauge strings are a little bit difficult to play. Corrosion resistivity is another factor which must be kept in mind as far as durability of the strings is concerned. Nickel wound strings have better resistance and they provide longer life to the strings. One more thing is the erosive property. Generally, this part is neglected by everyone, but you should know that the strings rub against the frets while playing and erode them slowly. Gradually after few years of playing, you will notice that the frets are getting worn out. To support less wear of frets, try less erosive strings. Nylon strings are soft and are a good choice for beginners. But they do have professional use as far as Spanish guitar is concerned. As they are softer, they have lesser strength and break more easily as compared to steel strings. Steel strings are a bit hard to play but are very bright and are strong enough to provide good durability to the strings.
 

The Guitar Headstock

The head stock of a guitar is shown in the figure below.

The head stock of the guitar acts as a mounting platform for the tuning pegs. The head stock comes in different shapes and sizes but serves the same purpose of holding the tuning keys or tuning pegs. The diagram below shows the tuning pegs clearly.

The function of tuning pegs is to tune the guitar strings and keep the same in tune for a period of time. The better the tuning pegs, the better will be the tuning stability. The tuning pegs basically work on a gear mechanism. When you rotate the head of the tuning pegs with your hand, the small spindle through the hole of which the strings pass ( see the above figure), gets a rotary motion through the gear system and the strings starts getting wound over the spindle. 

Many beginners while buying a new guitar do not seriously consider the tuning pegs. But let me tell you that if the tuning capacity of a guitar is not good, the guitar is not worth playing. If you get bad quality tuning pegs, you will get frustrated while always tuning your guitar. This is not the dangerous part. The dangerous part is, as a beginner if you start playing an untuned guitar, you will develop a bad ear. You will not be able to identify chords, scales and many other things because up to that time you would have trained your ears to identify wrong frequencies. If your guitar has tuning problem, go to a guitar shop and get your tuning keys changed with a new set of good quality tuning pegs. 

While buying a new guitar, try to rotate the tuning pegs and see if they are smooth or not. If they are not smooth please never buy that one. Next thing, tune the guitar and bend one of the strings as much as you can somewhere around the twelfth fret and again check the tuning. Check if there is any deviation. If there is any, you know what you need to do. 

Guitar setup and maintainance

Many beginners make a very serious mistake by not taking care of their instruments. And the result is that, the playability on the instrument is dramatically degraded even if you have gained a good skill on your fingers. And it happens that you start thinking its your fault. But actually the fault is that due to poor maintenance your guitar is not in a condition to be played fluently. Your guitar may look clean and shining but is it all required for fluent playability? No.
 There are many things that you must consider. The first is the set up of your guitar. Periodically take your guitar for set up to the guitar shop. You should carefully choose the correct set of string gauge.
As a beginner, one should go for light gauges of strings. One should use a pick or plectrum as it is called which is neither very thick nor very thin. But for rhythm playing I suggest you to go for thin picks in the beginning. The nest thing is that you should check the action of your guitar. Action means the height of strings from the fret or the fretboard. The action must be low for a good playability. Keep your guitar always in the guitar bag or case whatever you have because the temperature and humidity changes in the surrounding may cause your guitar to go out of order- the most common problem being witnessed is the neck bend. So keep checking regularly to ensure that the neck of your guitar is straight. Further, after playing guitar, wipe the strings as it will soak out any kind of sweat or dirt from the strings. Also keep changing the strings on a regular basis because with time, the strings start loosing there brightness and real tone characteristics.