perfect good to go just kidding hey it's Nate Savage here and I want to show you how to fix that annoying buzz or string rattle on your guitar particularly your acoustic guitar in this video but a lot of these tips apply to the electric as well a lot of these tips are gonna be just how to diagnose if something is wrong with your guitar and what you do with that diagnosis depends on how adventurous you want to get with either repairing your own guitar Or if you don't want to do that, maybe you need to take it into a professional. But we'll go through a few different ways to tell what is causing the string buzz. Here you go.
The first thing is just your guitar technique. Do you need to refine it and have, you know, just better technique for getting a better, cleaner sounding sound out of your guitar? And the first little chord I played there was just a bar chord.
And there are a lot of things wrong with it. I wasn't pushing down hard enough. My fingers are back towards like the middle of the fret. Instead of being right behind the fret and I guess that's the first tip for technique is be right behind the fret Step toward the middle or the back because you're gonna get buzz if you do that All right. Next thing is your truss rod on your guitar I'm gonna intentionally put this truss rod in a position where it has a back bow to it or the neck has a back bow to it Where you get a really nasty rattle and a lot of people are kind of afraid to mess with their truss rod They think you're gonna mess it up.
And as long as you aren't extreme with it You're really not gonna mess it up. It's just a matter of getting to know your guitar and experimenting with adjusting the truss rod So let me tighten it up a little bit to where this guitar just isn't buzzing with open strings So that's pretty buzzy even just open and pretty buzzy there too and um the way you can tell if you need to adjust your truss rod or not is to check the relief or the bow of the neck and the really easy way to do that without having to get rulers or you know uh feeler gauges out is to just fret up here with your thumb where the guitar neck meets the body then fret the first fret and then try to tap and see if there's any space at all because what you're basically doing is using the string as a straight edge to see how straight the neck is And there's no gap between the string and the frets. Usually you can hear a ping, but that tells me that my neck is either too straight, too dead straight, or it's back bowed a little bit, and that's why I'm getting that buzzing sound.
So what I would do is just, and I know I did like three quarter turns on this, so hopefully that'll be put about in the same place. And then I would check the relief again, so fret the joint of the body, and then the first fret. and you can hear that there's some space in between there and the buzz is gone so just experimenting with adjusting your truss rod and getting a little bit of relief in there and finding out how much relief you like according to your playing style if you pick hard you're going to want a little bit more relief if you pick really lightly you're going to want a little bit less maybe even almost perfectly straight but that's a really common problem or common reason for having a buzzy sounding guitar that you might want to experiment with for yourself you Okay, the next reason why your guitar might be buzzing is it might need a fret dressing or fret job.
Now, as we play guitar over and over and over again, playing the same chords, you might get divots in your frets where they wore out. Because nickel is what most guitar frets are made of, and nickel is pretty soft. And you can see this guitar needs a fret dressing actually, especially on the B string.
There are divots in those frets. And what happens is when you have a divot in a fret, the fret goes down farther than it normally would if it didn't have a divot there. And what happens is it goes down lower here than it normally would, which makes it even lower here.
And it's not quite bad enough on this guitar yet to know. You can hear it there a little bit, a little bit buzzy, because it's buzzing up against the next fret that doesn't have a divot in it here, which is, I don't know. This one's pretty bad as I'm all the way up here, but it gets progressively less. But low frets or divots in your frets can be a contributing factor to fret buzz. And one way that you can deal with this is to just level your frets yourself.
If you want to get in some guitar repair, it's not that hard. It is a little bit scary, but you would straighten your neck as straight as you can get it. And then get something like this. It's just a fret leveling beam where you put sandpaper on it, like sticky sandpaper, you know, that has adhesive on the back of it. And you just level your frets.
And then you do a fret crowning too. I'll show you a tool for that here. So once you have your frets leveled. and you may or may not want to get into this, it may be easier for you to just pay somebody to do it for you, then you would file the frets to where they have a nice crown on them, they're even all the way across, no divots, anything like that, and that'll take care of a lot of buzzing issues.
The next reason that you might have some buzzing on your guitar is that the nut slots are too low or the nut needs to be replaced. And there's a quick... Quick test that you can use to see if your nut slots are too low. This is my Alvarez Yari GY1 and it's I think a 1990 model and it's the original nut on it. So it is time to replace this nut.
Probably also time to replace the saddles and it needs a fret dressing too. So this guitar is just in bad shape but we're gonna get it playing good over the next few months. But the way you can tell if your nut is too low you can use a capo to just capo the third fret.
and then check this out i don't know if i can do this left-handed but we'll see then tap on the first fret and you should hear a ping on each string you hear that and this first string right here is barely pinging at all if at all a little bit but you can tell that it's like almost no clearance under you can even push on it and you don't see it move all the other strings you can see move a little bit but this high E string is pretty low and there's even a divot there on the first fret which makes me think that this nut is even too low here because I adjusted the truss rod on this guitar let all the tension out lefty loosey right and to let the strings take over and even then it was still getting some buzzing on the open high E string so that's a telltale sign if that your nut is too low and another telltale sign is if your strings are actually buzzing open the last thing that we're going to cover in this video that might be causing some string buzzing is a low saddle and if you have your guitar set up right all the frets are dressed in a nice shape if your nut is the right height and you have a you know the right amount of neck relief on your guitar then the last culprit could be the saddle on your guitar and this is really where you get your action from how high your action is and one real easy way to check this is just with a string action gauge And it even has here on the back what the recommended kind of ballpark thing is or measurements are for an acoustic guitar. And it's 2 to 2.5 millimeters on the bass side, sorry, on the 6 string and then 1.5 to 2 on the first string. So what you do is just come in here, millimeter side and check the action.
If it's way low, like around 1.25 or 1.50 or lower at the 12th fret, then you... might need to consider replacing your saddles here and along the lines of if you want to actually replace a nut or a saddle it's easier nowadays than it ever has been because of companies like graph tech that make those tusk nuts that you can just take your old nut off pop a new one in it's really easy they usually fit really well the height is usually set pretty right and the same thing goes for your saddles if you need to replace your saddle it's easier now than it ever has been to just pop a new saddle in there so those are some of the ways that i found over the years to Kind of diagnose why you're getting fret buzz on your guitar. If you have any other ones that have really helped you out, leave them in the comments below to help the guitar community out here. And we'll see you later.