Any one here know much about guitar setup?

[cmudave]

I've been to a lot of thrifts stores and have seen so many sweet old and cool guitars for very cheap prices but of course they always have huge flaws; for example the action is ridiculously high, the intonation is off, they have fret buzz and dead notes. I've thought about buying a few of them but figured it wouldn't be worth it to have to pay to get them set up considering it would probably cost more than the actual guitars themselves. Then I thought about how cool it would be to actually learn how to set them up for myself and keep some, and sell some to make some profit.

Does any one here have any experience with setting up guitars? If so is it fairly easy to learn how to do? Anyone know any good books, videos, magazines, websites, etc that show a step by step process on guitar set up for fixing frett buzz, intonation, lowering the action etc? How do I know where to start? For example: If I want to fix fret buzz on a guitar how do I know whether or not there is a problem with the nut or the bolt or if the truss rod needs to be adjusted? BTW acoustic steel string guitars is what I would be focusing on.

 

[Ian Curtis]

http://www.fretnotguitarrepair.com

Are you a good guitar player? I need to know how to mute properly strings Im not playing and I also get annoying noise when lifting my finger from the string.
Thanks

 

[cleverusername]

the head of my acoustic broke off last week when i accidently knocked it over. I fixed it with some gorilla glue and a c clamp. That's about the extent of my guitar repairing. You can find tons of videos on youtube though. Like if you want to lower the action and there isn't a nut to adjust the bridge you can just file the string grooves. If you're getting fret buzz check to see if the neck is warped and adjust the curvature.

 

[Obsidian]

While the internet has vast information you can learn about. The best thing you can do is go to a guitar shop and ask them to let you see how they set the intonation, fix the fret buzz, and more. That is how I learned it.

 

[cleverusername]

I just bought myself a squire strat off ebay with a little 10w amp for $100. Hopefully I won't have to make too many changes when it gets here.

 

[cmudave]

http://www.fretnotguitarrepair.com

Are you a good guitar player? I need to know how to mute properly strings Im not playing and I also get annoying noise when lifting my finger from the string.
Thanks

Thanks man, thats just what i was looking for, cool website. I would consider myself a pretty decent guitar player. They key to muting strings is just laying you finger lightly over the strings for example if you are playing something like this.

e|---
B|---
G|---
D|-9-
A|-X-
E|-7--

You would just curve the finger you are fretting the seven with , ( in this case it would be the index finger) overr the A string so it is slightly resting on it.

If you are playing bar chords and you want to put an accent on your strumming pattern with a muting technique just lift your fingers of the fret until they are just lightly touching the strings.

You can also do this by just resting the palm of your picking hand across all of the strings, that is usually done with open chords since they are kind of hard to mute with the fretting hand.

Its kind of hard to explain without demonstrating, but hopefully it helped a little.