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How to check if your guitar’s neck needs to be adjusted.
One of my recent columns dealt with some of the things that can go wrong with your guitar’s top nut. Big slots, thin strings; the perfect recipe for horrible buzzes and rattles.
I realize you’re eager to dig out some tools and learn how to repair your faulty nut. Me too. We’re almost there, but, just for a moment, let’s take it down a notch. Think baby steps.
Those nasty string buzzes and rattles can also be caused by nut slots that are cut too low. In extreme cases, the string(s) might actually be sitting on the first fret; or often a string just has to be close enough to the fret to make contact when it’s struck open.
Your gut reaction might be to grab a hammer to beat the offending top nut to death and glue a new one in there. But wait. Just like a nut with worn or over-wide slots, you can repair perilously low slots with super glue.
Again, as Dick Van Dyke would say, diagnosis is everything. Don’t approach your guitar with any tool until you know A) what the problem is, and B) what you need to do to fix it.
Last time I mentioned that you should always make sure that a guitar is tuned up to pitch—or to any alternate tuning that it may be set up to handle. If the tuning isn’t right, it can affect the neck.
If the slots on the nut appear too low—you’re getting the buzzes and rattles when you play open strings, etc.—it could be that the neck needs to be adjusted. If the guitar is tuned too low, the neck won’t have enough tension on it and