problem setting the intonation

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doctornads

New member
Hey guys. A few days ago i went to set the intonation on my gibson x-plorer. When i turned the saddle for the string i was working on nothing changed on my tuner. The string was tuned but the 12th fret stayed sharp no matter what. It didnt get any more sharp or any more flat. For pretty much all the strings. Also the saddle is as far back as it can go so i cant even turn it anymore. ( if its sharp make the saddle move away) Whats going on??
 
Im not home with it right now. So i dont know off hand. What i do know is that where i would go to turn the screws for the saddles is facing the body. not towards the neck... if that helps.
 
doctornads said:
Im not home with it right now. So i dont know off hand. What i do know is that where i would go to turn the screws for the saddles is facing the body. not towards the neck... if that helps.
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That's how it should be. If you need to flip a saddle:

On a regular tune-o-matic bridge, there is a wire that goes across the tops of the adjustment screws and goes into holes in the bridge. With the strings off, pull this wire out of the holes with needlenose pliers, lift out the saddle that you want to turn around, and unscrew the screw from the saddle. Turn it around and run the screw back into it, drop it back into the slot, and replace the wire. This will give you another 1/8 inch or so movement of the saddle away from the neck.
 
doctornads said:
Hey guys. A few days ago i went to set the intonation on my gibson x-plorer. When i turned the saddle for the string i was working on nothing changed on my tuner. The string was tuned but the 12th fret stayed sharp no matter what. It didnt get any more sharp or any more flat. For pretty much all the strings. Also the saddle is as far back as it can go so i cant even turn it anymore. ( if its sharp make the saddle move away) Whats going on??
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I was going to ask if you had ever considered a compensated nut, but... nothing changed on the tuner when you shifted the saddle? Is that even possible? It should go REALLY SHARP with just a small adjustment. You should have to retune it significantly every time you tweak that screw. It almost makes me wonder if the strings aren't actually going through the saddle or something.... :)
 
ya some of the saddles were up really high and now there far away as possible and nothing changed on the tuner. Could my tuner maybe be just really fucked up or someting? anyways anything else anyone can think of... ill try flipping them around when i get home but if its sapposed to change drasticly by turning the screw alittle i dont think this will work but we shall see
 
doctornads said:
ya some of the saddles were up really high and now there far away as possible and nothing changed on the tuner. Could my tuner maybe be just really fucked up or someting? anyways anything else anyone can think of... ill try flipping them around when i get home but if its sapposed to change drasticly by turning the screw alittle i dont think this will work but we shall see
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You really need a strobe tuner to set the intonation accurately. It could be that your tuner doesn't have the resolution to see the diff when you move the saddle. You should be able to hear it, though.
 
Not really accurate enough. You can download Peterson's software strobe for about $50.

It sounds like your saddles are too high, causing the fretted notes to be stretched sharp on their way to the frets.
 
You need a better tuner. Strobes are the only ones which are acurate enough to set intonation properly, but of course they are quite expensive.

A couple other question, though; What's your neck look like? What does the nut look like? What's your action like? All of these things come before intonation, so if you can't answer any of those questions, you need to deal with that FIRST (though getting a strobe is not a bad idea).


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
everything is stock setup from gibson. Not that that would mean anything. Neck is straight the nut i dont know what are you asking about that. And the action is good. not too low and too high.
 
Light said:
You need a better tuner. Strobes are the only ones which are acurate enough to set intonation properly, but of course they are quite expensive.
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Keep checking eBay. I got a ridiculously good deal on a Conn Strobotuner there.
 
I wonder if the stop tail piece is to high since it sounds like the bridge came higher that it should have. You want a pretty step angle "bend over the bridge".
Also I would look for one of the bridge pieces interfering with another, maybe cocked sideways a little much in effect picking up the adjustment from its neighbor.

I think you can get a decent enough intonation out of a inexpensive intellitouch or something along those lines.
 
maybe you went too far. i would put all the saddles kinda in a central location, and go from there.

something weird could have happened, like you went so far that it had a reverse effect.
 
doctornads said:
everything is stock setup from gibson. Not that that would mean anything. Neck is straight the nut i dont know what are you asking about that. And the action is good. not too low and too high.
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Factory setups are NEVER right. Take your guitar to a good repair person, and get it set up. It is clear that you don't have the experience, and this is not the guitar you should be getting it on.

The neck shouldn't be straight. It should have a bit of bow in it (fret at the first fret and a fret near the body, and see how much of a gap there is between the bottom of the string and one of the middle frets - it should be about a playing card's thickness). As for the nut, I've never in my life seen a factory made nut which didn't have its slots too high. This in particular is not something you want to try to adjust yourself, because if you mess it up you need to take the nut out (to either shim or replace), but with Gibson's practice of lacquering in their nuts, you can cause some major cosmetic damage if you don't know what you are doing. THEN you set the action, and with a tune-o-matic you then need to set the height of the tailpiece. You need downward pressure on the saddle, but you don't want the string to touch the back edge of the bridge. It is only after all of that is right that you can start to worry about the intonation, because you won't be able to set it properly if everything else is not right.

But you also need a good tuner to set intonation, and that means a Strobe. Getting all the tools to do a setup properly is quite expensive, and gaining the experience and knowledge on a rather expensive guitar is just not the best of ideas. If you really want to learn, buy Dan Erlewine's book on the subject, and start by practicing on something cheap.

Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
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