William Cumpiano's Page

When a guitar is hard to play, the first course of action is to lower the string array just a bit closer to the frets. To do this however, may be as simple as twisting a bolt, or as extreme as removing the neck and rebuilding the neck joint—resetting the guitar’s neck.

The tricky part of deciding whether or not to reset your guitar’s neck, is that the major symptom of a bad neck angle – hard playing – is also a symptom of many other simpler problems. We could conceivably go to the considerable… Continue

Hello! again, to all you dedicated guitar lovers who want to know how the guitar does what it does and how it can be made to do it better. In this installment, you will find a continuation of my greater plan to address the whys and hows of neck resets.

If you haven't already noticed, you will at the end of this issue have discovered my devious master plan: by the time we finally get down to whether and how a neck reset should be done, you will all have been carried (without hardly noticing it)… Continue

What if, after you've verified that the rod adjustment and nut clearances are optimum, you find your string action is still unacceptably high? Your last remaining simple remedy is to cut down the saddle. This has a down side: as you lower the saddle you decrease the mechanical advantage of the string tension as it levers the soundboard. It's like shortening the arm on a crowbar. In effect, it's like turning the volume knob down on the guitar a little bit.

By this time, you will be familiar with… Continue