Electric Guitar Setup

by Erick Coleman and Elliot John-Conry

from their 2006 GAL Convention workshop

Originally published in American Lutherie #98, 2009



Guitar companies can only set up their guitars to a certain level and still be cost effective. So even a lot of brand new guitars are brought to our shop to be super set up.

Since Erick works for Stewart-MacDonald and we both work in Dan Erlewine’s shop, most of the tools and materials we’re going to mention today are available from Stew-Mac.

We do all the neck work on the neck jig. This jig simulates the guitar under string tension. If you simply remove the strings, set the guitar on your bench, tweak the truss rod until everything looks level, then proceed to level the frets, you may find that once it is strung again your leveling job has gone to hell. You haven’t accounted for the abnormalities that string tension usually puts in the neck, and neither have you accounted for the effects of gravity differences between the guitar lying flat on your bench and the guitar in playing position. So we not only use the jig to simulate string tension, we tilt the guitar into playing position before the jig is adjusted. We use about a 70° angle to simulate playing position, since few of the guitar players we know have a stomach flat enough to hold the guitar at a 90° angle to the planet.