Care and Patience

Here´s the final stages of the SJ no. 30. Inlaying the logo into the headstock and finishing the neck with oil varnish, positioning the bridge and removing the lacquer where its going to be glued on and then final setup. With my last guitars I paid more and more attention to the final setup. By now I know I can build and they all can make some music if the bridge stays in place and doesn´t fall off once under string tension. But since that didn´t happen yet (knock on wood) I will concentrate a great deal on the final setup once all the other work is done. 

Some years ago early in my luthiery adventure I was lucky enough to have a great customer who had perfect pitch. He bought one of my guitars but was very unhappy with the intonation. Now I could have just said "you fool, wrong instrument anyway, go play a violin" but I wanted to learn and he was kind and patient enough with me and we digged deep into the rabbidhole of intonation on guitar. And I learned that I had not paid enough attention to this on the instruments I was building. 

At the end of a long learning process I was able to setup his guitar with a intonation where the notes at the 12th fret were all in a range of being not more then 1 or 2 cent off. A normal person starts hearing that something is wrong at about 6 cent off. At 12 cent it starts to sound wrong. He was very happy. I was too. 

These days I am able to dial in my intonation to 90 % or 95 % with my standard measurements. The rest is done on the instrument. Steel strings are pretty consistent. 

Although I´ll bring my string action down to 2 mm for the low E and 1,6 mm for the high e. If the customer doesn´t want it higher. Because some players do. 

At the end of the day I think a guitar can only be as succesful as the setup allows it do be. And thats not hard to achieve. It just takes care and patience.