Plek Technology | Ultimate Guitar Setup

Deriving its name from the word 'plectrum', the Plek machine is revolutionizing the way guitar setups are traditionally done. The brainchild of German inventor Gerd Anke, the Plek still relies on the trussrod adjustment to be done by hand, but once that is accomplished -- watch out!  The Plek machine takes over with unerring accuracy; measuring, grinding and crowning each fret to 1/100th of a mm.  That's a fraction of a millimetre folks. 

If the map of Plek users in the video (1:29) is anything to go by, it appears that there are already a considerable number of Plek machines earning their keep throughout the US, with some guitar manufacturers owning several:

Martin Guitars (Nazareth) -- 13
Heritage Guitars (Kalamazoo) -- 12
Wechter (Paw Paw) -- 6
G & L Guitars (Fullerton) -- 3
Gibson Guitars (Nashville) -- 10
Suhr Guitars (Lake Elsinore) -- 4

Suhr Guitars puts their four Plek's to good use even on their imported Rasmus guitar line.  And other than guitar manufacturers, a number of repair shops have also purchased Plek machines of their own.

See the Plek in action in this video starting at 2:26.

20 Life-Saving and Extremely Useful Guitar and Gear Tips!

To commemorate my 200th post, here are 20 useful, and on occasion, life-saving guitar and gear tips that have worked for me over the years.

• Leave cables with solderless plugs for home or studio use.  I really like the tone of cables with solderless plugs.  They usually tend to be of high quality and sound really transparent.   But they're also most prone to a bad or loose connection that can be a nightmare to troubleshoot, especially if you have a huge pedalboard.

• Use an aural exciter if you need to punch through the band without playing louder.  An aural exciter works by separating the different frequencies in a signal by milliseconds so that they reach the input source or amplifier at slightly different times.  This separation reduces muddying of frequencies resulting in better clarity.

• If you've just bought a new multi effects pedal, don't bother tweaking the tone at home.  Once the rest of the band kicks in, it's going to sound totally different onstage.  Book a couple of hours rehearsal time with your band and tell your mates that the session is purely for you to tweak your sound 

• Don't pay attention to the numbers on the knobs when tweaking your gear. Just keep twisting the knobs till the sound approximates what you hear in your head.  Then use the numbers as a reference to remember later.

• When using an amp modelling pedal in a live situation, play through a clean solid state amp -- I love the Roland JC120 or JC160 solid-state amps for this application.  Tube amps impart too much of their own color to the sound.  A direct line into the PA also works well but you'll need a good soundman who can give you a good onstage monitor mix

• Go stereo.  All the famous cats, from Steve Lukather to Pat Metheny to John Scofield do it.  Stereo creates a nice spread to the sound, and surprisingly lets you relax more as you play because you're not dealing with a sound that is emanating from a single, direct source.  And going stereo let's the bass player enjoy some of your juicy tones from his side of the stage too!  

• A simple truss-rod adjustment can make a guitar play like butter.  Learn to do this yourself or shell out a few bills for a repairman or luthier.  My personal preference is for absolutely no neck relief.

• If you're going to be leaving your guitar on a stand between sets, unplug that guitar cable and put it away from the instrument.  Guitar cables have a tendency to get caught in people's feet, unleashing that prized PRS Private Stock onto the floor.  The floor always wins.  If you play an expensive instrument, it belongs back in the case between sets, no matter how gorgeous it looks onstage on a stand.  'At first it's all ooh and ahh, and then there's running and screaming..'

• If you have your guitar setup the way you like it but there is still some fretting out somewhere around the 17th to 20th frets you might want to check that the screws on that bolt-on neck are not torqued too tightly.  Overtightened screws tend to push against the fingerboard, causing a slight hump which can lead to fret buzz. This applies especially to fretless bass!  Thanks to my friend and bass virtuoso Serge Dionne for this tip!

• A compressor is your best friend for clean tones.  It fattens the sound, increases perceived sustain and generally imparts a polished, studio-quality tone.  Add a smidgen of reverb and you're golden.

• You can buff out ragged edges on a guitar pick by rubbing it against carpet!

• Pickups set too close to the strings can cause a warbling, double-toned, 'out-of-tuneness' when playing above the 12th fret.  This is especially true of single-coil pickups.  Back the pickups off a little more and allow the strings to 'breathe' and vibrate through their full ellipse.  But back the pickups off too much and you'll lose some output.  Find a happy medium.

• The neck pickup always sounds louder than the bridge pickup -- the neck pickup sees a far bigger vibrational movement of the string.  I like to set Stratocaster pickups or Les Paul pickups so that the relative volumes between each pickup are as equal as I can get it.  And this usually means setting the neck, and middle pickups (on a Strat) slightly lower than the bridge pickup. This will also help in alleviating the warbling and intonation problems I mentioned earlier.  

• On nylon string guitars you can get away with changing the nylon treble strings once with every three or four changes of the metal wound bass strings.

• If you go with stainless steel strings on an electric, you can leave the bass strings and get away with replacing only the top three treble strings two or three times before you have to replace the entire set.  Clean the bass strings between changes with isopropyl alcohol or even aftershave lotion!

• Rosewood fretboards tend to dry out and need to be lightly oiled once every six months.  Just a smidgen of lemon oil does the trick.  I usually also take this opportunity to go over the fingerboard with a soft toothbrush, removing any gunk that has accumulated.  Moisturized rosewood has a nice luster and shows off the grain of the wood.  Dunlop makes some nice fingerboard conditioning products.

• Maple fingerboards usually have some kind of hard finish over them and therefore do not need moisturizing.  Just the occasional cleaning with a coarse, damp rag -- with the strings off of course.

• Clean volume, tone and wah wah potentiometers with a spritz of a good quality contact cleaner meant for electronics.  Servisol brand contact cleaner is probably the best.  Don't use WD40 as it has too much gunky industrial lubricant that will build up and spell trouble in the long run!    

• Stewart-MacDonald produces radius gauges for measuring arcs between 7 1/4" and 20".  Repairman use these gauges and often adjust the bridge arc radius to match the fingerboard radius.  When I did get hold of one of these radius gauges I measured how I had set up the bridge saddles on my own guitars.  I found that I had consistently gone with a 12" arc radius, regardless of fingerboard radius, on all my guitars, purely by feel.  Just my preference, but you might want to experiment with the gauges yourself.  Dan Erlewine's 'How To Make Your Electric Guitar Play Great' includes free radius gauges in soft vinyl.  A must have!

• With some bolt-on neck guitars you may find that the bridge saddles are as low as they can possibly go but that the action is still too high.  Shimming the neck in the neck pocket is your only option in these cases -- I've used strips cut out of business cards for this purpose in the past.  The added tilt to the neck angle automatically causes the strings to sit lower to the fretboard.  Fender's Micro-Tilt feature performs this adjustment admirably without having to add shims or even remove the neck. 

 So there we go.  Twenty of my most useful guitar and gear tips.  What are some of yours?

Eric Johnson's Setup Secrets -- Part II

My article on Eric Johnson's setup secrets from a while ago proved quite popular. This article is a more detailed follow-up.

In 2001, top-notch guitar repairman Gary Brawer took some careful measurements of Eric Johnson's beloved '58 Stratocaster. These were his findings:

• The guitar was refretted with new .105 x .040 frets
• The center of each fret was slightly milled to flatten out the radius to prevent bent notes from fretting out
• String height is set at 4/64" for the high E and just under 4/64" for the low E, with both measurements taken at the 12th fret. The high E is set slightly higher to facilitate clean bending
• The truss-rod is adjusted so that there is absolutely no relief on the fingerboard
• The nut is cut low with just enough clearance for the open strings to ring cleanly
• The string ends are not inserted into the center holes of the tuners. Instead the string ends are threaded between each tuner's center slot and then wrapped around each post two or three times.
• The B string is wound all the way to the bottom of the tuning post and is not threaded through the string-tree
• At the bridge, stock vintage saddles are used on all the strings except for the high E. Here Eric uses a brass saddle to fatten up its sound.
• The four tremelo springs (set three on the bass side and one on the treble side) are tensioned just enough to keep the bridge resting against the body of the guitar, ensuring maximum transference of string energy. This setup also ensures that bending a string will also not cause other unbent strings to lower in pitch
• Except for a simple re-wiring of the second tone pot so that it controls the bridge pickup, all electronics are stock

• Eric sets the bridge pickup closer to the strings. The center polepieces on the bridge pickup are also pushed down to reduce the arc of the polepieces

• The neck pickup is 10/64" from the strings. The middle pickup is 12/64" from the strings on the treble side and 10/64" on the bass side. The bridge pickup is set at 6/64" on the bass side and 4/64" on the treble side

• Strings are GHS Nickel Rockers gauged .010, .013, .017, .026, .038 and .050

Gary's blog is loaded with pics and info about the repair work (and more) on the guitars and basses that come through his shop. Check it out here:

http://www.brawerguitarrepair.blogspot.com/


Eric's '58 Stratocaster is featured throughout this HotLicks DVD:

Flash Review #1 -- Ibanez Andy Timmons AT100CLSB

My girlfriend took this video of me noodling on an Ibanez AT100 at a music store in Kuala Lumpur. Which gave me an idea for a new series for The Guitar Column -- the Flash Review. (And if I had known she was recording I would have put the guitar through its tonal paces more, from clean to dirty, and everything in between. Oh well, next time..)

Here's Flash Review #1 -- The Ibanez Andy Timmons AT100CLSB:

Featuring an alder body on a maple neck, the AT100 is a joy to play.

When I picked up the guitar, the neck immediately reminded of the limited-run Loch Ness green JEM 777's of the late 80's-- a neck shape which Ibanez didn't incorporate into subsequent editions of the JEM.

The AT100's fingerboard edges are slightly rounded off for that played-for-years, broken-in feel, and the jumbo frets were substantial without being overly high or wide -- they felt a little like Dunlop 6105's.

Hardware consists of Sperzel locking tuners and a Wilkinson vintage tremelo with bent steel saddles. This Wilkinson model is a six-screw mount design but on the AT100, the middle two screws are intentionally left out.

This was a common way to get a Strat's six-screw tremelo to behave more like a two-point fulcrum edge, increasing tremelo range and more accurate return to 'zero' thus stabilizing tuning. Some folks went so far as to remove the middle four screws, leaving only the outer two.

But there was a problem with this particular instrument -- the guitar totally fretted out from the 5th to the 7th frets. There was also a considerable bow in the neck -- a sure sign that somebody had spotted the fret-out, loosened the truss-rod thinking that that would fix the problem while leaving a little dent at the truss-rod nut channel at the headstock in the process. Ouch.

Fret-outs notwithstanding, the AT100 feels and sounds like a really nice, thoughtfully souped-up Strat. The imperceptibly slight 'V' shape on the back of neck makes for a very comfortable ride, with the thin finish giving it the texture of raw, unfinished wood.

The two DiMarzio Cruiser pickups blended very well with the DiMarzio AT1 custom humbucker at the bridge. There wasn't that unpleasant tonal jump when shifting from the neck pickups single-coil'ish tones to the full-blown humbucker at the bridge -- a typical problem with guitars with the single/single/humbucker configuration.

The tonal balance of this combination of pickups is nearly perfect.

Another feature I really liked was how the first tone pot controlled the neck and middle pickups, while the second tone pot was dedicated to the bridge humbucker. This is extremely useful for tempering the bridge pickup's tone when stick-shifting between pickups, so you don't sound like you 'just picked up a different guitar' when you shift from the neck to the bridge pickup -- as how Scott Henderson aptly puts it.

The AT100 is probably the nearest thing, in terms of tone and feel, to a Fender Stratocaster in Ibanez's current line. It captures the traditional vibe surprisingly well (never mind the pointy headstock) while breezing effortlessly into more modern territory at the flick of a switch.

Couple the AT100 with a Timmons-approved Xotic BB Preamp, for absolute tone heaven!

Guitar Truss Rod Setup Tips

This is how I like my guitars to be set up, so much of the information here is really based on my personal preference. Take these ideas as a starting point and feel free to experiment and get it to where you like it.

There are three primary areas on the guitar that can be (and are meant to be) adjusted.

These are:

• the nut
• the truss rod
• the bridge

Of the three, the height of the nut is best taken care of by an experienced repairman/luthier, and the complexity of bridge adjustment qualifies it for its own unique article. We will leave these out of the equation for now.

Bear in mind that both the truss rod and bridge adjustments will affect how a guitar plays and feels -- the 'action'.


In this article we'll focus on truss rod adjustment, which is something I get asked about a lot by my students and guitar-playing friends.

Truss rod adjustments need to be done before working on the bridge section. This is because any adjustment done to the height of the bridge will be negated when the truss rod is adjusted.

This is how a truss rod works:

A truss rod adds strength and stability to the guitar's neck and also plays an important role as far as string action and left hand playing comfort. When the truss rod nut is turned clockwise, the rod tightens, pushing up against the guitar's fingerboard and straightening out the neck. The truss rod nut is located either at the headstock end or at the body end of the fingerboard and it is usually adjusted with a specifically sized allen wrench, or a flathead screwdriver depending on the type of nut.

Most times, new guitars come with too much 'relief'. Using the low E string as a sort of straightedge guide, press and hold the string at the first fret (a capo in this case is invaluable) while simultaneously holding the same string down at the highest possible fret on the guitar (21st, 22nd or 24th fret depending) with the right hand index finger.

Now look closely and check for the slight gap between the 7th fret and the bottom of the 6th string.

If you can slip a 1mm pick under that gap easily and without moving the string, you have way too much relief. The gap should ideally be about the thickness of a business card.

Or, as I prefer it, with no relief at all.

If you're going the 'no relief' route, be prepared for some string buzzes around the first to third frets on the low 6th and 5th strings. This is normal, and the buzzes are usually inaudible through a guitar amp, since these lower frets are too far away from the pickups for the imperfections to be heard. If you're adjusting an acoustic guitar I would recommend going the business card route.

If you have too much relief, you need to tighten the truss rod. At this point, if you're not confident in your abilities, or if the guitar is old and hasn't been adjusted in a while, do not proceed and take your guitar to someone who knows how to do this stuff.

Loosen the 4th and 3rd strings only so you have some room to maneuver and insert the appropriately sized allen wrench or screwdriver.

To tighten the truss rod, face the truss rod nut towards you. If the truss rod nut is at the headstock end, sit with the headstock pointing directly at you. 'Righty tighty, lefty, loosey' applies here so we need to tighten the nut by turning it to the right, or clockwise. If the truss rod nut is at the body end, rest the guitar on a workbench and with the nut facing you, do the same, turning clockwise.

Adjust in small increments of no more than a quarter of a turn at a time.

If the truss rod nut seems unusually difficult to turn, do not proceed. It might be a simple a matter of lubricating the threads of the nut a little. In a worst case scenario, your truss rod may be maxed out -- in which case you have a problem and pretty much have to live with the relief. Or pay a pretty penny for a luthier to remove the fingerboard, adjust the rod, and re-glue the fingerboard.

On the flip side, if you can't fit a business card underneath the string when doing the 1st fret and last fret procedure, and your guitar is buzzing excessively and/or fretting out at the lower 3 or 4 frets on all the strings, then you have a 'reverse bow' which means that the truss rod is too tight and pushing up excessively against the fingerboard causing a hump. Loosen the truss rod by following the above procedure but turning the truss rod nut to the left or counter clockwise.

I'll cover bridge adjustment thoroughly in a later article. For now, once you have adjusted your truss rod correctly, adjust your bridge height to taste, which may be as simple as the turn of a thumb-screw in the case of a Les Paul tune-o-matic bridge, or adjusting the heights of the individual saddles on a Strat.

Go for an action that allows the guitar to play reasonably cleanly. But remember, a little string buzz is your friend! Check out Hendrix's Little Wing and you'll hear his guitar strings buzzing all over the place.

The amount of relief affects how your guitar feels, plays and sounds to a very great degree.

Stay tuned for my article on bridge adjustment where I'll talk a bit about the various kinds of bridges and some of their adjustment quirks.