In serious trouble....

  • Thread starter Thread starter OmniMind
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OmniMind

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Ok so i had a fret buzz on frets 1-5 so i decided, hey lets twist the truss rod alittle ( BTW This is an acoustic Gibson Jumbo ) well here is the problem, I finger the last and 1st fret of the guitar and get roughly 2 sheets of papers width from 8th fret to the bottom of the E string, and when i try to tune it.... well thats when all hell breaks loose, like the 5 and 5 will be in tune but the Harmonics are out... then when I tune by Harmonics the 5 and 5 are out... so in other words im thinking... somthing is wrong and its to the point now where im about to smash this thing on the street and regret it .00002 seconds after i do it, Please help, and please lamens terms. I dont understand all the .1200in space crap, and i never understood those little diagrams drawn with dashes and dots and lines... they dont even look like a guitar.
 
No tsure I understand you, but from here I see two possible issues.
1. Two sheets of paper from the frets is too close, bound to lead to fret buzz.
2. Your intonation is off, bring it to a trusted shop if you cannot fix it yourself.

I may have misinterpreted so anyone feel free to correct.

.120" is about 4 credit cards thick, or an 8th of an inch.
 
Yeah, take it to a good repair shop. I really don't know what the problem is without seeing it, but what I am guessing is you have humidity related issues. Heating season is upon us, and this time of year guitars start acting weird.

It is like the sign in our shop says:

Carefully selected pieces of wood, under carefully controlled situations, will do pretty much as they damn well please.

What is probably happening is that you turned on the heat in your house, and the humidity crashed (as it always does when you turn on your heat). Wood being hydroscopic, it tried to equalize it's humidity with the surrounding air, and as a result, it's moisture content fall drastically. When wood dries, it shrinks. This leads to all kinds of problems, from cracking of the top, back, and sides; to fingerboard shrinkage, and frets don't shrink, so you get these sharp, pointy little razors sticking out of the side of your neck, to top sinkage. They literally just start to become bowl shaped. On really bad ones, we can look at them from twenty feet away in the shop and can see and yell, "Salad Bowl!!!!" When the top sinks like this, the bridge sinks along with it, and the action goes excessively low, and the guitar starts to buzz.

I know, I know. You LIKE low action. Everyone likes low action. But if it is buzzing, it is too low, most of the time.

So it sounds like you may have a sunken top. The first step to fixing this is to get one of THESE. The second step is to go to a Target or Wal-Mart or wherever, and get your self a little plastic travel soap dish - the kind with a cover on it - and a sponge. Drill some holes in the cover of the soap dish, cut the sponge to fit the dish, get the sponge as wet as you can without it dripping water all over your case, and put it in the soap dish. Put the cover on the soap dish, and put it in your guitar case (up by the headstock) and use that with the Lifeguard. Keep your guitar in the case when you are not playing it. In time, this will fix most of your original problem, but as you have adjusted your truss rod, so you have another problem now. Take your guitar to a good repair shop, and get it set up by someone who knows what they are doing, and while it is there, it will humidify itself nicely (at least, I assume all shops keep there shops as humid as we do, which is much more humid than you can keep your house without ruining your house. It is good to have an all masonry building). And by the way, the Kyser Lifeguard comes with a little plastic ring around it, which the inventor tells me is to improve the fit on really thin tops. You don't need it, and he is wrong. All it does is scratch the shit out of the face of your guitar. Throw it away. You don't need it. Really.

The truss rod, by the way, does not fix buzzes (most of the time), and it does not adjust the action. You have, as do most amateurs and layman, a fundamental misunderstanding of what a truss rod does. It adjusts neck bow. Period. That is ALL that it does. This will, due to the complicated nature of a guitar’s geometry, affect the action, but it does not adjust it. Ever. Action is adjusted at the nut and the saddle. By a professional. If you don't understand basic measurements, you should not be doing this yourself. Take it to a good repair shop.

And by the by, if your guitar has a fancy maple neck, (flames or quilts, or whatever), then you should probably just resign yourself to the fact that it will need a setup 3-4 times a year. Those things move like a diving board when humidity changes. You may be able to work with a repair person to make you different saddles for winter and summer (or a shim for the winter), but you will need the truss rod adjusted when the seasons change. The real problem is the movement of heavily figured maple is not at all predictable. Not at all.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
OmniMind said:
like the 5 and 5 will be in tune but the Harmonics are out... then when I tune by Harmonics the 5 and 5 are out

Other than the setup issue, generally you should never tune to harmonics, because the harmonic is a perfect fifth that doesn't match the intonation of the tempered frets.
 
Light thank you for all your help, and I will prob follow suit.

oh and btw... I dont care for action thta is low.
 
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