How to Set Up an Electric Guitar

Transcript So now you want to adjust the intonation on your bass guitar. What that means is whether or not the instrument plays in tune with itself. The way you do that is you pluck the low E, and then fret the low E, at the twelfth fret and it should be the same note. …

Transcript So now, we’re going to string the guitar up, and we said before, we had 10 to 46 gauge strings. So, we’re going to grab the low E. String it through the tail piece, over top of the bridge. Now, we’re going to come up here and we want to wind around twice and …

Transcript My name is Ricky. I work at Main Drag Music. I’m the head guitar buyer/seller, or more like curating these days. It’s pretty exciting. I grew up playing music. I’m still an active musician, as most of us are here. Coming in and getting to see these instruments that I read about when I …

Transcript So, the tools you’re going to need to set up your Fender Bass are a short ruler, some wire snips for cutting strings, a radius gauge for checking the radius, fret guard for polishing the frets, a pair of dowel calipers for measuring string gauges, small flathead screwdriver, a Phillips head screwdriver that’s a …

Transcript Alright, so now we’re going to adjust the pickup heights on a Gibson Les Paul. This also can be personal preference. It depends on what kind of sound you like. Some guys like to bury the pickups further in the guitar and have to really play it and let the amp do more work. …

Transcript Now we’re going to learn how to clean the bass. That’s cleaning the frets, polishing the body. The first thing you want to do is take the strings off. It’s a really good idea to de-tune it as much as possible before you cut the strings off. You don’t want to have a sudden …

Transcript Now you’re going to adjust the pick-up height on your bass guitar. Largely, this is a matter of personal preference. Some people like it really close to the string for a much louder tone. Some people like the hollow sound of having the pick up a little further away. A good way to start …

Transcript This is how you’re going to tune your bass guitar. You want to get a nice tuner. I like to use Peterson. You plug it in. Your first note is going to be E. On the Peterson, it’s a strobe tuner, so you want to play the note until the strobe stops running and …

Transcript So this is how you adjust the bridge saddles on a Fender bass guitar, and that’s actually setting the action too. That’s another way to say it. What you want to do is you want to take a measurement. You do that by pressing on the string of the first fret and measuring at …

Transcript There’s a couple of ways you can tell, one is if it’s oxidized and there’ll be actual rust on the string, that generally means that it’s time to put new ones on there. If they look okay and they feel okay, a lot of times when the cores of the strings start to go …

Transcript You want to pick a nice set of strings that you like. It’s a matter of personal preference. These are D’Addario’s and they’re actually color coded and there’s a guide on the back to figure out what string is what. You can pretty much tell yourself though because they’re really thick and not thick …

Transcript Les Paul Standard versus Les Paul Studio. Same pick-up configuration, two hum bucking pickups, same tone control (so you’ve got volume, volume, tone, tone), a three-way pickup selector. The Les Paul Studio is pretty bare bones. They went to cheaper hardware, cheaper tuning keys. The pickups aren’t the same. While they are the same …

Transcript So we are looking at a seventies precision center bass or P bass. This is like the quintessential sort of rock bass that you see mostly. Sort of related to the jazz base but not. The neck shape is very different , pick up configuration , body size , over all sound. We talked …

Transcript Basically, I’m going to describe now, briefly, the differences between passive electronics and active electronics. I’m going to show you these examples on basses. It can be applied to guitars. It’s the same principle. Typically you’d find, say, an active system on an acoustic guitar or acoustic-electric guitar. It just means that there’s a …

Transcript So a Gibson Les Paul. A Gibson Les Paul standard versus a Gibson Les Paul custom. It’s different woods used. They use more exotic woods on the fret board on the custom. And you’ll notice on a Les Paul custom, the whole thing is bound from headstock. The neck, the body, just has more …

Transcript Moving on from the Jaguar bass controls, which I demonstrated in the Jaguar guitar. We have here a Squire modified Jaguar bass. The body shape is the same as a Fender Jaguar bass. Fender makes different variations of their instruments. I think there are three models of the Jaguar bass right now. All of …

Transcript The best electric guitar for a beginner, that’s a highly debatable topic. Much of choosing a guitar is based on personal taste, and how the instrument speaks to you when you pick it up. I don’t believe in the idea that an acoustic guitar is better than an electric guitar for a beginner, or …

Transcript Here with have the Squire by Fender Bronco Bass. It gets its namesake from the model guitar called the Fender Bronco that’s no longer in production. It has a student model as were the original Fenders – smaller body, smaller neck shape, single pickup, not so much in the way of controls to confuse …

Transcript Right now, we’re dealing with a fendered-tube bass amp, it’s The Bassman 135, sitting on top of an Ampeg speaker cabinet. When you’re dealing with tube amps, it’s important to realize that there are certain things you need to do before you can actually get into it and take off. Especially when you’re not …

Transcript We are going to get into the Jaguar and it’s controls. This is a ’65 Fender Jaguar. It’s been stripped to the bare wood with a light finish on it. A common thing people did in the 70s was strip away the finishes on a guitar and go for the all-natural vibe. This control …

Transcript This is a ’70s Telecaster Deluxe. Basically, when they were coming out with this guitar, sort of an obvious attempt to capture the vibe of their competitor, which is Gibson. With two hum bucking pickups, three way toggle switch, and volume control for each pickup and a tone control for each pickup. They also …

Transcript We have a Fender Jazz Bass, this is a Squire model. Basically the same controls, take-up layout, size, this is just sort of more Fender’s budget model. Two pickups, this one plays sort of, you know, strategically to get more of a deeper sound. Closer to the bridge, you’re going to get more treble …

Transcript The Fender neck profile system. It’s the same designation for basses as it is for guitars. C shape, U shape, and V shape. There are different variations of each shape. You could have a hard V. It’s literally the cross section of the neck follows the shape of a letter. I have two examples …