Making Neck Adjustments on an Electric Guitar

Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Tim Ambrosius. I'm a professional guitar tech. And, I'm going to show you how to adjust the neck on your electric guitar. First what you need is just a screwdriver and an allen wrench to adjust it. First, what you need to do is take off the truss rod plate cover. Most guitars will have one at least one to three screws, maybe four, on the truss rod plate. Sometimes it's necessary to loosen the strings so that you can get to the screws. Which is annoying. All right. Then, what you'll have is a truss rod that goes all the way down the neck. And, that will adjust the tension on the neck, so that either will be under bowed or over bowed. Right now, this guitar is a little bit under bowed. So, what we'll need to do is tighten the truss rod. So what you need to do is just look down the neck, and see compared to the strings because the strings are going to run exactly straight, you can look down the neck and see whether or not it's under bowed or over bowed. And right now, this one is a little bit under bowed. Now, when it's like this is to tighten the truss rod. The other way we'd go is if its over bowed, you'll see all the frets will be a lot closer to the strings. You'll see a hump in the neck. That way you have to loosen the neck. So, we need to tighten the neck, or tighten the truss rod. Take your allen wrench. There's going to be an allen screw in here under the truss rod. What you do, is just find it. Sometime you have to loosen the strings to get some space so you can adjust it. Now, now it just worked before. There we go. Now, what we're going to do we're going to give it about two quarter turns. Let's see where that takes us. You have to make sure when you do a check a neck that the right tension is on it and that you're up to pitch. Because sometimes that can effect how the neck sits. So, I just need to check the tuning on the tuner. Because after you adjust the neck it is going to adjust the tuning just slightly. So, I've just adjusted it and tuned it up. See where it's at. It's still a little bit under bowed, better than it was before. So, what we'll do is just loosen the strings again, and do another quarter turn. The truss rod is pretty loose, so it should be fine. Make sure you're in tune. All right. Check the neck one more time. And, it looks fine for now. So, in effect lowering the action, making the guitar play a lot better than it did before, playing the way it should be. The last thing you just need to do, is just throw your truss rod plate cover on. And, you're all finished.

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