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hpr_transcripts/hpr2801.txt

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+Episode: 2801
+Title: HPR2801: Guitar Set Up Part 1.
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2801/hpr2801.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-19 17:01:32
+
+---
+
+This is HPR episode 2,801 entitled Guitar Setup Part 1.
+It is hosted by NY Wheel and is about 29 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
+The summary is, NY Wheel talks about setting up a guitar.
+This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
+Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
+Get your web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
+Hello, this is NY Bill and I'm here with a guitar related HPR today.
+It's still going to be hacking a bit because we're going to be tweaking on the guitar, not
+playing it or teaching it, but I was, geez, I start a lot of my podcasts like this, I was
+doing something online and saw this.
+Why did I see this online?
+Well, it doesn't matter.
+I saw this and I kind of, I didn't laugh, but like, you know, I wonder what I could do
+with this.
+I wonder if I could take a very inexpensive fender and make it play as good as a $1,000
+$2,000 American fender.
+So I happen to see this in the corner and it was 269 delivered free.
+I don't know if you consider that a lot, but, you know, as far as guitar goes, as I'm concerned,
+you know, for, you know, your electric's going to be a nice electric going to be a $1,000,
+$1,200 bucks, pushing up, if you're going to go for like a Gibson Les Paul, you're going
+to be getting into like, geez, $2,000, $2,500.
+If you want like a Gibson ES, American, then you're starting to creep up around $4,000,
+you know, guitars can get very expensive.
+But I'm wondering if you can find like an inexpensive, they've got to be out there.
+I haven't been in a guitar store in probably 20 years.
+I've been, any guitar I've bought, you know, in the recent past has been from online.
+And I've, I've been playing guitar for, geez, I'm really old now.
+It's been a long time.
+And in that journey, I restored a guitar, 1956 Les Paul.
+And I had to, the Les Paul was, I weird, my friend and I first got our apartment.
+This was probably, oh, 1991ish or something like that.
+A friend and I decided, you know, it's time to move out of our parents house and he wanted
+to as well.
+And I said, well, why don't we get a apartment together and then it'll be cheaper.
+So we couldn't afford furniture.
+I'm just digressing here because this all comes back to guitar.
+We couldn't afford furniture.
+So like, you know, friends or family on both sides gave us a couch or, you know, a table,
+you know, something like that.
+And in the town we lived in, they're in the spring.
+They do like a, you know, a spring clean.
+You can put anything at the curb and the, uh, the trashman will come and take it.
+So we decided to go out at eight o'clock at night when everybody put their trash out and
+see if we could find anything that we could put in our new apartment.
+And like we found a lamp.
+This lamp ended up shocking me.
+That's guitar related as well.
+Jeez, I'm going to have to digress twice.
+And we found like an end table.
+All right, the guitar shocked me.
+Once we get in the apartment, I'm playing an amp.
+And if you touch the strings, you're grounded.
+And the lamp was at old like 1950s, two prong plug.
+And someone had wired it wrong up in the socket so that the neutral, which should be on the
+outside of the bulb and the hot, which is just a little pin on the bulb, that was backwards.
+So the neutral was making the whole, or the, the reverse wiring of it was making all the
+metal parts on this lamp live and the neutrals in the middle.
+And I'm holding a guitar once in that living room.
+And I reach over to turn on or off that light.
+And I touch the metal of that lamp and boom, 120 volts through me.
+The amp goes, and well, my whole body did as well.
+Okay, we go back.
+The aggression goes back.
+You're going to have to follow this.
+Like, what are we on?
+So we're driving around.
+And for some reason we kept finding bowling balls and we took a whole bunch of bowling balls
+and we were like, we had like 20 bowling balls and we're in his driveway, like pretending
+it's like pool and making a knockoff each other.
+You know what you do way back when you're like 20 years old and you can't even afford a
+beer yet.
+You just do weird things.
+Or we found beer.
+More likely we had found beer and we're playing with bowling balls.
+So I'm in the passenger seat.
+He's driving around and we take this turn.
+It's dark.
+I think I had a flashlight and I'm looking in the garbage.
+Yes, we were out garbage picking.
+And in the corner of my eye, I see what looks like a headstock of a guitar.
+And he keeps driving.
+He keeps driving.
+I go, hey, Bill, his name is Bill as well.
+Just go around the block one more time.
+Let me go see what this is.
+And we come up on it and it is the headstock of a guitar.
+And I put the flashlight on it and I look closer and it says Gibson.
+So immediately this is going in the car.
+Whatever the heck this is, it's going in the car and we're taking it home.
+So I get out, I take some garbage off from either side of it and it's a Gibson Les Paul.
+The kicker is it's burned.
+The thing was burned.
+So near as I can tell, there was a house fire here.
+This was a 1956 Les Paul and it was in the case.
+The back, the Mahogany and the back got some syncing.
+The top seemed okay.
+All the binding was gone.
+Every mother of pearl dot up the neck and the binding there was gone as well.
+It was like all melted away.
+Some of the mother of pearl was in there.
+It was like shrunken and brown and like curled up.
+So that got burned.
+Up in the Gibson, the G was gone.
+The I was gone.
+The dot over the I is still there.
+It's like original equipment, the B, the S, everything and then the end of the N was
+still there.
+The neck was completely warped and the fretboard was pulling away from it up to about the seventh
+fret.
+The neck was going backwards and the fretboard was going forwards.
+Now this might seem like a lost cost to you, but as like a 20 year old kid finding a 1956
+Les Paul, I think the serial number was six and then there was a little space.
+Six, space, one, one, six, space, it was either six space, one, one, six, six or six
+space, one, six, six.
+I remember making a joke to my friend that it's got three sixes in it so it was supposed
+to burn.
+Anyways, I took this thing home and we, you know, I put it on a table and I was just staring
+at it for a long time and then it dawned on me.
+Why don't I try and restore this thing?
+And it took like years, I had to, you know, find out where to buy mother a pearl and find
+out how to cut mother a pearl and find out how to shape it and inlay all those in and
+find out how to do binding.
+They and the whole thing down, I had to do, figure out how to fix the neck which was just
+loosen up the truss rod and that straightened out the neck part of it and then glue the
+fretboard back to it, you know, the binding.
+I couldn't really do paint very well back then so it was like, I spray painted it black
+and they had the, you know, the original cream binding.
+I found all the, not original, but like period replacement stuff on a place called Stewart
+McDonald's and I've used them quite a bit over the years.
+They sell guitar making supplies.
+Some people say they can be a touch expensive, that's, you know, if you want to keep looking,
+there's like allied, allied Luthorii and, geez, what's that really inexpensive one?
+Guitar fetish.
+That's a really inexpensive one where, you know, you can get inexpensive hardware as
+well.
+Anyways, I've kind of been out of the scene for a while.
+I still build here and there but I haven't built one in quite a while.
+Where the heck was I going with that?
+Oh, so if I realized like a few years after like getting that guitar playable again, that
+geez, if I just did everything to this guitar except for cut out the body shape, why don't
+I try and build my own guitar?
+So this was 20 years back, I started it amassing, well, not amassing tools, I didn't buy a
+whole entire workshop to begin with but I would use like any tool I could find at my
+grandfather's or, and I did start building guitars for starting with electrics and then
+eventually acoustics.
+So if you look around on my media goblin or even I had a flicker account and somehow flicker
+over the years has changed NY small B-I-L-L to capital NY space, capital B-I-L-L.
+I don't know where that happened or who did it but I haven't used it in years but if
+you look there, you'll see a telecaster that I built as well.
+I was trying to recreate a original telecaster in 1952, was it black guard?
+Okay, we go through all that to say, that was 10 minute ramble just to say what I'm
+going to say now.
+I was online somewhere and I saw the inexpensive squires and I thought, can I get one of these
+fairly inexpensive guitars and make it play as well as something that's going to cost
+a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars?
+It's in my hand now.
+I opened it up.
+I've always liked telecasters.
+This is a squire telecaster and I've always liked the original, I don't know how close
+this is to the butterscotch, but this is that yellowy butterscotch.
+But however, I like rosewood fretboards just personally.
+I can play, you know, maple's fine but just for some reason I prefer, I don't know, looking
+at it or touching it rosewood.
+So it came in the box and I was expecting like a bit of a wreck, inexpensive guitars
+I've seen in the past, like screws will be crooked, things won't line up, the neck
+will have like crack next to it, the finish will be junk.
+I was really shocked with this guitar, this guitar is in good shape.
+The neck feels fine, the finish all looks good, all the hardware looks good.
+I haven't plugged it in so I don't know, sometimes they cheap out on the pickups but it
+plays good already, it stays in tune.
+The interesting thing with this, this might be where there's doing some cost cutting,
+it doesn't have any finish on the neck.
+It seems like, well I don't know if it's almost like an oil finish.
+So it feels almost like wood, it's very smooth, but I find that's really good for playability.
+So I guess what I would do to this guitar, besides I don't know if in the future I probably
+won't keep this, I'm going to give it to like one of my nephews on my knees.
+What it does need, what I find it needs is the frets aren't polished, they scratch, I
+don't know if you can hear that, let me get the, so if I play this note and can you hear
+like scratching, you should do like a mirror finish.
+So the first thing that needs to do is these frets need to polish up.
+A lot of cheap guitars come with a very cheap plastic nut, this one seems to have something
+like a Korean or whatever they call that like a fake bone, so the nut seems good.
+I like the height at the nut at the first fret, let me check the relief.
+So the relief is higher than I expected.
+So the relief is controlled by the truss lock and it's the curvature of the neck and you
+want a little bit of relief, you want the neck to kind of bow, is that the light work?
+Bow up, it's to get, so when you bend the note it would, it would short out, short out.
+It's for playability when you bend a note, if you didn't have any relief you're going
+to hit that next fret, the next fret in front of it is going to kill the note.
+But this has like a fair amount more than I would put on a set up.
+The other thing is the string action, it's good, it's playable, but I think I can get
+it lower and faster.
+So I'm going to have to take this down to my workbench, cut the strings off it, I'll
+talk about masking the neck, I'll talk about polishing the frets, I will talk about changing
+the bridge height and doing intonation and setting the relief on the neck.
+So let's do all that and I'll, I'm saying, let's do all, like I'm not going to do it right
+now, I'm upstairs, I got to go downstairs and I'll see how well I can get this, this
+one playing, I have a 96 American Strat, I can, you know, use as a comparison.
+I play that all the time, so if I can get it as good as playing that one, that one plays
+very nicely.
+And I also have a, it's either in 1993 or 1994, they call them MIM, it's a made in Mexico,
+telecaster, that one is the only guitar I bought brand new and I still have to this day.
+So that one plays very nice as well, there's a rumor that when they were setting up the
+Mexican factory, they didn't have the facilities to make necks yet.
+So those very early MIMs, Fender America was, well, they were probably, you know, what,
+a hundred miles apart, ones in California, ones down in Mexico.
+But the American factory was sending down American necks because the Mexican factory didn't
+have the tooling to do necks yet.
+So some of those early, early 90s made in Mexico Fenders were coming with an American
+neck, which is all, like, they are nice necks and it was all nicely polished.
+That guitar play is very nice.
+So let me see if I can get the, like, this scratch drives me nuts.
+I suppose you could call it sustain, you could just keep scratching this thing and this
+stain will stay there.
+But no, we're not doing that.
+No, all right, let me get this down to the bench and I'll talk about it some more.
+All right, I'm down here in the settler.
+I just put a towel over my woodwork bench just so I don't mower up the finish.
+I also use a neck cradle, it's another thing you get from guitar supplies.
+Oh, the other, what was the other place you can get guitar parts?
+It's going to come to me.
+Anyways, it'll come to me.
+So now that I'm down here, the telecaster that I made from scratch is here as well and
+the yellows are different.
+Let me take a picture and the one.
+So the lacquer that I used on the 52 black guard that I made years back, I got from
+a place called Re Ranch and they make, you can get, they re, what do you want to say,
+re blend, they make old guitar colors and you can buy it as either you can get like
+court or you can get a rattle can.
+So this one that I got, I'm going to take a picture here in a minute, was the butterscotch,
+the old original butterscotch and those were ash guitars.
+There's new one, I don't know what's underneath it, it kind of looks like alder, alder, alder.
+But the yellow is too buttery, maybe it's just like a moderate, maybe this is not butterscotch
+but some other thing.
+You see if you can tell the difference, yeah you can see the difference.
+So in this shot here in the front is the butterscotch and in the back is the yellow, the kind of
+more buttery yellow.
+I do like that you can see the grain through the finish on this wire though.
+So usually on these inexpensive, well inexpensive guitars, they use almost like plywood.
+They may have done that here.
+I haven't opened it, maybe I'll open it later, I got to get the strings off first.
+What they'll do is the whole entire inside of the guitar will be like layers of plywood
+and then on the top is just the thin laminate of like a decorative wood and on the back is
+a thin laminate of decorative wood and then the sides which I'm looking at now, you can't
+see through the sides.
+So there could be laminates there that no, they're not.
+I can see through the sides and this is a stacked set, one, two, three, four, five, six.
+Well much more than an American, Americans use like two or three, no so far, so far like
+for the price of this, this is decent.
+This is not like a piece of plywood unless they've gone through it awful lot of trouble
+to try and mask it which would just increase the cost.
+This looks like I'm not sure what type of wood it is but it's a solid, it's a solid guitar.
+So the first thing to do is I got to get these strings off, just I'll take the tension
+off and once I get the tension off I want to look at the neck relief again, see if it's
+changed.
+So the neck relief, now it still seems like a quite a bow, a back bow.
+So goodbye strings, oh if you're doing an acoustic, don't do what I'm doing.
+Change your acoustic strings one at a time so you're not stressing out that top, solid
+body guitar.
+You can just clip them just like this.
+I don't know what type of strings these are too.
+I'm going to get these strings off, yeah they didn't, they didn't go out of their
+way to secure the string on the post, there's a technique to that, that could be an HPR
+all by itself, all right strings are off, there is no garbage, garbage, the other thing
+you do not get, oh yeah you do, I was just going to say you do not get any hardware
+with it, but yeah there's the Allen wrench, the two Allen wrench, oh good the two Allen
+wrenches, I was just looking in the garbage when I threw the strings out and some of the
+packaging is still there, the packaging that was going over the headstock and here is
+the Allen wrench to adjust the truss rod and here is the Allen wrench to adjust the bridge,
+I'll need both of those, okay I'll set those aside.
+So the first thing, yeah this is a decent nut, whatever the material is it's not like
+cheap plastic.
+The first thing to do to buff up frets is to mask the fretboard and you do that with
+just the ordinary blue painter's tape, which I don't know where mine is, oh yeah it's
+on the floor, where else do you keep it?
+What you also need though to do this is scissors, it keeps scissors over here because this
+is two inch painter's tape and you could get smaller I suppose, smaller painter's tape.
+But as you go up the fretboard, you know the frets are getting closer and closer together
+you got to start cutting this stuff in strips, yeah it's even too big for the very first
+fret so let me just cut it in half and just overlap it.
+So I got a cut edge that's ragged, I got a straight edge right off the tape so I'll put
+the straight edge right at the nut, the ragged edge is on the first fret and then the
+straight edge from the tape and have the ragged edge overlap the other tape, so I'll do
+a few of these and I'll take a picture and show you, yeah I can see now it's like a
+minimal, they probably leveled the frets and then they did a minimal crowning, I don't
+know if I'm going to re-crown these, I have a crowning tool, crowning is putting the
+after you level the frets, they're all flat on the top and the crowning tool is like a
+file that is convex and it will put the ridge, geez I don't have any terms for this stuff
+it's just on my head, it'll put the fret ridge back in the roundover, okay so like if
+I stop here, so here's the first three frets mask and if you see on the third fret how
+I cut the tape and that ragged edge, I'll just put the straight edge up at the second fret
+then let the ragged edge hang there and then I'll put the straight edge of the same piece
+of tape I cut on the third fret and let the ragged edge you know just overlap that tape,
+do that all the way up the neck and I'll stop talking here and I'll do that all the way
+up the neck, so as I was masking off this squier neck, I looked to my left and I realized
+that that 56 Les Paul is over here in a case, I suppose I could take a picture of it,
+I'm dropping the recorder in the open this thing, it's been a while, it's sanded back
+down now, I had a cheap, not cheap, but I had the closest, I could find to a gold
+top from guitar or a car rattle can, so like go to the automotive place and I found like
+some gold with gold flake and I spray painted the whole thing, it never looked right but when
+I found that re-ranged company I found that they had gold top paint, lacquer, so I ordered
+that and when I ordered that I sanded this thing back down and I thought you know I'm going
+to do it properly, I think I sanded it in the fall but I have to wait till late spring,
+like I have to, when I do lacquer it's a whole spray rig, it's out in the garage and
+you got to wear a mask with lacquer because it's pretty harsh and I spray a quick coat
+on a guitar and then I open the garage doors to let the air go out, I don't have a proper
+ventilation area, but anyways here is the camera, this is the 56 gold top, at the top
+you can see I'm doing a repair, I don't know if you can zoom in on this, well I can just
+take a snapshot here, so there's the original head, you can see I've worn off it is at the
+top, the Gibson, like I said, only the end of that end and the dot over the eye is original.
+What I'm doing here in the, where the tuners go, those were so worn out from the years
+that they started to like wiggle and just make the wood warp, so I've got some maple
+dolls in there, but they're not just maple dolls, they are maple sandwiched with mahogany,
+so on the back you see mahogany and on the top you see the proper maple, that gets stained
+black up at the top, down here, so there are the original soap bars that came on a 56,
+and if you look in those cavities that's the original gold top paint, I didn't take
+any of that off, and down on the bridge one, you can see where I started writing, I
+was like 20 years old back then, so this thing's pretty old in its restored state, it still
+smells really cool, I started writing the serial number, but that's faded, so it looks
+like it might have been 6166, that's possible, what went wrong here, when I got it I went
+down and grabbed my father's 35 millimeter camera, this is back in the film days, but I
+didn't really know how to use it, so I took his camera and I took a role of film and I
+loaded it at the best I knew how, and I took pictures of this guitar burned and in its
+terrible state with the expectations of restoring it and then showing the before and after,
+and then showing the before and after, but not knowing how to load that 35 millimeter,
+I guess I didn't have the film over on the wind, that wind spindle, so I closed the
+camera up and I started winding, and the top of the camera says you're on picture one,
+and I took a picture, what I never got that film up on that spindle and it never started
+winding, so I took 24 pictures and then brought the film to a place to get processed and
+the lady goes, there's no pictures on this film, so I kind of regret that, I do have
+other pictures like during the restoration, but those are actually pictures, I would have
+to scan them if I showed anybody, pictures before we did these quick pictures with our
+phone, so anyways, I just finished up masking the squire, here's a picture of it masked,
+and it's getting late, I have to go start dinner soon, so I think this might be like a two
+or a three-parter, because I'll talk about setting up a guitar, getting the frets leveled
+and buffed and all that, and setting up the truss rod, setting up the bridge, the differences
+between doing this with a coosthick and electric, this could be, yeah, this could take a couple
+parts, so, alright, I'm going to leave you hanging there, till next time guys.
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