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I’ve played a half dozen very high end guitars this week - easily twice my going rate - the setups are terrible! Almost unplayable IMO. People pick one of mine up and are astonished at how easy they are to play! “Butta” is the most common term used…


EDIT More specifically, the nut action and the fretwork...

Why?

Maybe they were good out of the womb but settled in and no one noticed or possibly overzealous humidification. I always warn people that almost all new guitars will need a tweaking in 6-12 months. Seems like higher action from gradual settling can kind of sneak up on folks and they are amazed when it's fixed

Or maybe they were just "not good" from the get go.

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

I think you nailed it, Terence. Setups and fretwork out there, even on so-called "high end" guitars is often appalling. Seems to be just a lack of awareness. Making a guitar look like pictures on the web is just not enough.

Michael, what people say about your guitars is exactly what I heard from Adrienne, who has one of yours.

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formerly known around here as burbank
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http://www.patfosterguitars.com

What surprises (and disappoints) me the most about this reality is that, while doing a truly fantastic setup can take a lot of hard finicky work, doing a “moderately OK” setup does not. If you can build a guitar, and if you play guitar, you have both the ability to feel when a guitar is not right and the basic skills to make it feel better. Use them! My guitars are not perfect (I have a lot to learn still), but they feel good to the player, because I take the time to at least give each guitar a “moderately OK” setup. Otherwise, why bother building it?

Maybe some of it is builders who cannot play? I don’t think I reach even intermediate playing ability but it’s very clear to me when something is not comfortably playable. If I didn’t play at all I would find someone experienced to pay to give me feedback on the setup.


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I must admit I've had some setups in where top end guitars ($7000+) have had poor to absolutely inexusable setups, including Plek jobs.

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

The Martin factory pushes out over 2000 new guitars each week. Taylor does 750 per day.
There is barely time to put strings on, much less do a set up on each individual instrument. At Martin they say that every instrument gets a Plek treatment - which is what passes for set-up in a modern factory these days, even on a $10k D-45.

Some things:

This is why I have been hammering home for years that a guitar is not, not just a woodworking project. If you want to build successful guitars a guitar is a tool for a musician and as such the set-up and how it plays is FAR more important than a radial rosette, inlay in the bridge and a host of other things that people spend a lot of time on.

The set-up is the human interface to the instrument and as such it will very nearly instantaneously give someone an overall impression of that instrument that may be positive or negative.

Regarding factories. Most factory instruments are not set-up when they ship. A PLEK is not a set-up it's an effort to level the fret plane and cut nut slots to match, sometimes.... It depends on the program, the operator and how much time the maker wants the thing to be on the PLEK. It does not address action, intonation or relief which all have to be manually set even when there is input from the PLEK scans. It's value is that it can produce a pretty good for a factory instrument fret plane but they need to be dialed in by skilled Luthiers or they won't play right or well. It's also a machine and will do it all day long without complaining like I do....

Some boutique makers will PLEK and then do as I suggest here and follow-up with hand work. I believe Suhr and Collings use this approach which in my thinking this is the best of all worlds.

A skilled human is still capable of superior work to a PLEK and most of us don't charge $125K with a $25K annual maintenance and support fee.... Maybe I should....

I never built commissions and told people who wanted to commission me that I won't accept any commissions. I built what I wanted keeping my creative expression freedom and then someone had to sit in my shop and try out an existing guitar that I had built. If they liked it they could buy it. By then I had learned to set them up and I often heard that the set-up was a major reason for the purchase.

Every week we have clients bringing us brand new instruments which is why I have put on our web site from time to time that most new instruments are not set-up and will require a set-up. Many of these that I personally set-up have been PLEKed and some even have spent the $300 from one seller to set it up with a PLEK. Again the PLEK is really only concerned with the fret plane and nut slots. Even still we take nut slots lower than the PLEK work for the the reseller I speak of.

In days gone by there was an expectation that when Martin and others shipped to the selling dealer that the dealer would set it up. Enter the big box reseller who may simply pass an instrument from the factory to you with nothing more than a fast visual inspection for cosmetic defects. Some dealers still set up what they sell, thankfully but it's rarer and rarer these days.

With this said people play their new guitar for some years at times struggling, dealing with it playing much harder than it should and even at times giving up learning to play guitar and gettin rid of it.

Lastly ask the folks who took our set-up and fretting classes (which we no longer offer it was too hard to cram what we wanted to share into two days..) what an eye opener it was to them. One student and friend of mine had built 400 guitars when he came to class. If you wonder if he was concerned that the first 400 clients would think that he must have not known how to set them up when they bought theirs my answer is no. He was MOST concerned with producing the finest instruments possible and that desire had led him to the idea and reality that when the bandsaw is off, tool room lights are low and at the end of the day how your creations/guitars play will be mostly what you are remembered for and what matters most to clients.

I'm actually a little surprised at how surprised some folks are here that new instruments are commonly not set-up. It's been this way for at least 2 - 3 decades now. It's also what paid off my mortgage.

And another reason not to disparage starting with kit guitars. With a kit the easy stuff is done for you, the hard stuff that turns a piece of furniture into a device that makes beautiful music and is a joy to play is not.

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

Seems to me that if a truly good setup is a priority for a factory, they'd figure out how to do it, no matter how many guitars they put out in a day. They just have to decide how much money they want to throw at it. This is where process engineering comes in. If the setup person (assuming there is one) doesn't have enough time to do it right, maybe there needs to be several people doing it.

Granted that a guitar factory might not be laid out as a conventional factory, but for the sake of argument, let's say if a factory puts out 400 per day, that's 50 per hour in one eight hour shift, or one guitar every 1.2 minutes. If there's only one main assembly line, then as a guitar moves down the line, no one station can take up more than 1.2 minutes or quota won't be met. If a setup takes more than that, the step could be broken down into smaller bits, such as nut slots at one station, saddle height at the next. If six or more nut slots can't be done properly in 1.2 minutes, then there might be more than one station doing nut slots, which would require a line layout with one "pipe" feeding the setup area consisting of two or more stations, or however many might be needed. Whatever part is being worked on, there has to be one completed every 1.2 minutes.

If saddle and nut slots were done separately, this setup area would require a minimum of two stations, one for saddles, one for nut slots. If more than one station is needed for nut slots, the setup area would have three or more stations. If the factory made 12-strings, the setup area would have yet more stations. Once setup was complete, the line would taper back down to a single pipe. It explains why, in guitar factories, we see carts full of partially complete guitar bodies or necks buffered and waiting to move into their respective areas or stations for the next step in the process.

Overhead would quickly expand in terms of personnel, floor space, and the logistics of moving bulky, fragile guitars in and out of the setup area. Looking at this scenario, it makes good setups look time consuming in a factory, thus expensive. I worked in a computer factory years ago, close to but not in process engineering. I cannot imagine the difficulties applying manufacturing principles to buillding acoustic guitars. From Hesh's post, "when the bandsaw is off, tool room lights are low and at the end of the day how your creations/guitars play will be mostly what you are remembered" would be the most difficult part to transfer from a solo hand builder to a factory environment. Ya gotta hand it to any factory that can do it right.

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formerly known around here as burbank
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http://www.patfosterguitars.com

I might be reading too much into Michael’s original post, but when I hear “high end,” factory built guitars do not come to mind. I assumed he was talking about boutique or small factory guitars. In that environment, I don’t understand failing to take the time to give the guitar a “moderately OK” setup. You have already put a lot of personal attention into the instrument. Then you whiff on the setup? Doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.

Well said Pat and even though it's an expense for a factory to do decent set-ups it's my direct experience that it sells product.

The worker that is needed for skilled set-ups as the name implies skilled or semi-skilled and will be in high demand and as such should cost more to employ. It's also the story of the plastic, slotted bridge pin all over again. Before the plastic, slotted bridge pin a semi-skilled person was employed to carefully slot the top, plate and bridge for unslotted pins.

With the advent of the mass produced, cheap, plastic, slotted pins the skilled workers were no longer needed and instead factories decided to sacrifice bridge plates well into the future instead of paying for skilled labor.

And good point you do have to hand it to the factories who are willing to say slow it all down at some point and let's get every single one right. That's to be admired and even duplicated.

It is this getting it right thing.... doing the details and understanding and being capable of great set-ups that is a massive opportunity for everyone on the OLF who ever wants one of their, your creations in the hands of someone else that factories walk away from. Differentiation my friends is one of the major factors that may make products more desirable than the competition.

The fret work methods and set-up stuff that I share here and often wonder if anyone is recognizing that there is a bit of a master's course in information from the trenches need not really take more time for a builder either. It is simply first the acknowledgement and a guitar is indeed.... indeed a tool for a musician and not a wall hanging and second we set it up to play like butter and sing like an angel because it should be AND because other.... such as the usual suspects don't. Differentiation.

You guys have an opportunity here and those who will have great success like we see from our friend Michael here will recognize that the set-up is perhaps, perhaps the very most important thing in guitar building.