There are a few reasons why you might want to change your guitar nut. The old one being cracked, upgrading to a better material like bone, or maybe you took your old strings off and the nut fell off by itself. Gluing the nut is not completely necessary, the string pressure and friction between the…
With some guitars the nut will be loose and fall off when you change the strings, as there is no tension to hold it in place. This is quite normal with guitar nuts that haven’t been glued on, and you can easily fix them on the neck again with a little glue. The best glue…
There can be a number of reasons why your guitar doesn’t sound good when playing chords. The problem can be either your guitar, or (shock…horror) you! Some reasons for bad sounding chords can be old strings, bad tuning or intonation, fretboard problems, or simply the way you are fretting the chords. More experienced players can…
Many new wonders of Yamaha Silent guitars are not happy with the strings they come fitted with, and want to replace them with something better. In some cases the strings are just a bit old, but for some players they just don’t like the sound of the factory-fitted strings. Yamaha Silent guitars are designed to…
Tuning your guitar is a relatively easy task once you have a little experience, but if your tuning pegs are stiff and hard to turn it makes tuning much harder. There are a few reasons why guitar tuning pegs get hard to turn, and usually it comes down to a combination of dirt, corrosion, age,…
For most guitars a ground wire to the bridge is a must to cut background hum while you play. With single coil pickups this is more important than with shielded humbuckers, or active pickups where the preamp circuitry already removes unwanted noise. Electric guitars still work fine without a ground-wired bridge, but there are some…
Every electric guitar and the guitarist playing it are different, and low action guitar setups combined with some playing styles can result in fret buzz. The question is how much fret buzz is normal before it becomes unacceptable, and how do you know if it is causing a problem to your sound? Having a guitar…
Although humbucking pickups are designed to reduce the hum that single coils are well known for, you can still reduce buzz even further. Depending on where you play, what equipment you play through, and the importance of quiet background buzz to you and your performances – it can be well worth adding shielding to an…
It’s frustrating when your guitar plays well at lower frets, but keeps getting fret buzz on higher frets above the 12th fret. Beginners won’t usually notice something like this, but as you start to get more advanced at playing you will be using the higher frets far more often. Fret buzz on high frets above…
If you’re tuning your guitar and a string snaps, don’t panic! There are a few things you can do to fix the problem. Old strings are more likely to break when tuning up due to the amount of wear, but sometimes new strings will break when first tuning up your guitar leaving you to wonder…
