Photography Neil Godwin, Olly Curtis & Joby Sessions
A while back one of the team was messing about with a Strat they’d had for a while. It sounded great but never quite felt fun to play, being a little too much like hard work to truly relish. Driven by curiosity, they dropped half a gauge in string size and cleaned and set up the guitar while they were at it. The result was transformative. The beautiful tone of the guitar remained, but now the expressiveness that comes with an easy-playing feel was also there - and the fun had returned with it. The point is that while larger repairs and modifications are often best left to qualified repairers or techs, there remains a wealth of reversible tweaks we can all make to our guitars to heighten their performance.
So, why do so many home guitar-maintenance jobs end in a sheepish trip to a tech when we get into difficulties trying to improve the setup and tone of our guitars? A lot of it has to do with method. If you proceed methodically and logically, many sticky situations can be avoided. The rub is that the aforementioned method (and a fair bit of ‘knack’, too) tends to come with experience. That’s why we got in touch some of the world’s top setup and maintenance experts, from master builders to seen-it-all repair specialists, to glean their hard-won tips on how to tweak, fettle and maintain your pride and joy the professional way, gaining self-confidence in the core essentials of setting up a guitar in the process.