zhivago wrote: ↑Fri Dec 04, 2020 12:18 am
Here's an update on this...Fuzzjunkie was right. It was fret buzz being picked up...all my Gibson guitars were set up the same, with the same action/string gauge etc.
I have now dedicated my ES-345 as "the band guitar", and cranked up the action, gave the neck some more relief, and also strung it with 11s.
The ringing is now almost completely gone...I think I still need to raise the action a touch, but I am letting the guitar settle first.
The downside is that the guitar doesn't play as easily as it used to, but what I have lost in playability I have gained in resonance, so it is not all bad...thankfully I don't bend much in this band/project, so I won't kill my fingers with the thicker stings.
A big thank you to everyone that chimed in, especially Fuzzjunkie!
Excellent! ‘Tis a delicate balance.
It got erased in the site reboot, but I will mention it again.
I have a ‘63 Jazzmaster and the neck feels great, but it’s not perfectly straight. I have played around with different string gauges, neck relief, and bridge height, but it has a slight ‘S’ curve to it. It had a couple of business cards in the neck pocket to shim it, but gave it a hump there instead, and I think as a result the neck bends back around the 3-5th frets.
Now these are just slight dips and humps, the guitar isn’t unplayable and the neck feels right and the guitar sounds amazing, so I never considered replacing it, even though Leo probably would. I have taken it to a couple of luthiers, including a now retired Jazzmaster expert.
His diagnosis after plugging it into a Tweed Princeton and playing it and then putting it on the bench and measuring it with calipers and straight edges:
“That’s a nice sounding guitar. You got the action really low. If you like the guitar, raise the action a bit, if you don’t I can find a buyer.”
Me: So you can’t straighten the neck?
Him: I seen worse, just raise the action and you’ll be fine.
Unless I am playing clean and very hard, there’s no buzz. I had to adjust my technique a bit though. I discovered that I was increasing the amount of buzz by the follow through of my picking action. I tried to describe it in the previous post that got erased, but I was only getting the buzz on the E and B strings below the 3rd fret, so I would get a buzz playing an open C or D chord. Slightly less on the A or G, and none on the E. Quite a bit on a barre F.
What I was doing is that for years I had played my guitars slung low, and my follow through on the end of a stroke, whether pricking or strumming, would snap the B and E strings a bit. My wrist was turning slightly upwards from parallel at the end of the stroke and compensating when starting the upstroke. As a result the pick wasn’t hitting the last 2 strings perpendicular, but slightly catching them underneath and lifting them up, which caused them to rotate in a plane that accentuated contact with the frets and buzz.
Once I corrected that, the buzz went away. Raising the action helped, but realizing I had developed a bad habit that affected my technique cleared it up and made my picking more accurate. I raised my guitar up as well and am not near as sloppy as I was. I mean, I made it work, I was happily playing that way for a long time, but being self taught I wasn’t the most efficient player and played more by feel.
That buzz made me a better player by making me assess my skills and work to improve them instead of just getting by with what I had.
