Full transcript of “How to Lower Strings on an Acoustic Guitar”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:04 [Music] Hey, it's been a while since I have done any videos for my Let's Build a Guitar channel. Um, and I'm sitting here in my office. This is not my workshop, so yeah, different surroundings if you've watched me before, but I had somebody drop off an acoustic guitar. It's a Yamaha acoustic guitar and it's for one of their kids to play. And apparently somebody came over and said, "Wow, the action is really, really high on that." And it is. If you can take a look at that, that action at the 12th fret is a quarter of an inch off of the frets. So, taking my little handy dandy homemade
0:50 tool as opposed to paying for one. I made my own just to level this out. Take a look at this. So, taking my level and putting it on here. Looking underneath of my level. I can see there's about an eighth of an inch gap here in the middle uh where we got quite a bit of a bow in the neck itself. So, this is a video that's mainly geared towards people who might not be experts at doing this type of thing, but I'm just going to show you if you've got a guitar, acoustic or electric, a way that you can get the strings closer to the frets, lower to the frets. You got to be cautious with some of this stuff because you don't want to overdo it. But, we're going to
1:37 adjust the truss rod. That's going to be one of the steps that we do. We're going to get this fretboard leveled out first. And then we're gonna see where we're at with the the height of our strings. I'm gonna get rid of these strings. These are some heavy, old, and somewhat rusty strings. So, we're going to put some lighter strings on, especially since it's for a younger person. Um, you you don't want to give a guitar to a young person that wants to learn how to play guitar that has really hard action or they're going to give up really quickly. So, we want to make this as easy to play. So, I'm going to put some extra light strings on this as well. Um, and then we're going to also see if we need to adjust the bridge at all, but we'll see how close we can get these strings
2:23 down to the frets. [Music] [Applause] [Music] While I've got the strings off, I'm going to take the opportunity to oil up the fretboard. Clean that up a little bit. Looks like it's been a long time since that's been done. Never use lemon oil or orange oil on your fretboard. I'm using a linseed oil, which is all right. There are better oils out there that are put out by like Stewack. you can uh find a special oil that's made just for this. Um, but linseed oil has been, I guess, fairly tried and true over the years for a lot of people. So, I've got some and
3:11 that's what I'm going to use. We'll just give that a good soak. Let it soak in. And a lot of that's going to absorb in into there. Kind of cleans it up a little bit, too. Frets look like they could be cleaned a little bit as well, which I've got the tools for doing that, but they're not here. They're at my at my shop. So, okay. Now, I'm going to use a 5 mm Allen wrench to adjust the truss rod. This truss rod access is accessible in here.
3:58 Sometimes they're up here on the headstock. Clearly, it's not there on the headstock. You can see that. Otherwise, there would be a plate there. So, I'm going to go in and I'm going to just give it a little turn. Righty tighty, lefty loosey. So, meaning if I'm bowed like this, I want to tighten the truss rod so that it straightens it out. If I need to if it's bowed the other direction, if it's bowed like this, then we need to loosen it so that it comes back up like this. So, we're going to tighten it to bring it down a little bit. So, I'm using a 5 mm Allen wrench. And it's got quite a bow in here. So, I'm going to give it a couple of turns if I can.
4:45 By turns, I mean about a quarter of a turn each time. And then I'm going to check it here and see how level we are. Okay, that actually already brought it. Wow. And maybe about another just slight slight slight turn. Of course, I have the tension of the strings off now, right? So, there's no string tension. I'm giving it about an eighth of a turn there. Give it another check here. See where we're at.
5:35 It's looking pretty good. Okay. So, with that done, now that we're level on the fretboard, we're going to check it. Put strings on it. check it. And if we're still off, then we're going to do a little bit of work on this bridge. But we're going to start up here for now with the strings. We're just going to rering it. Personally, I really like these Martin phosphor bronze extra lights is what I'm going to put on. Now, I really like these and they last a long long time for me. But I find that if you're somebody who has a high pH in your finger in your oils on your fingers, uh then these will probably rust out on you before too terrible long. Uh and then in that case, you might want to use an elixir type string. But I really prefer these. I like these
6:22 and they work great for me. But I've had other people with high pH in their skin that that have wrecked strings for me pretty quickly. So, just an FYI. [Music] Heat.
7:09 [Music] All right, strings are on. I've definitely lowered it by at least an eighth of an inch, but it's still way, way too high down here. So, first thing going to check see where we're at with how level is this. Now, once I put the strings on and there's tension there. Okay, my fretboard is still flat, which is good. So, the fretboard is flat.
7:56 My strings are still too high up here. Now, down here, it's very playable. Um, very playable. Not quite in tune, but [Music] So very playable if she were just to be playing open chords. Uh but if you're going to be playing any bar chords or anything, it's still too high down here. So the next thing that we're going to go for is since since because my front board is flat, I'm not going to adjust the truss rod anymore. I'm going to keep checking it because over time it can still move a little bit. So, I'm going to check it over the next couple days.
8:42 But my next place to go is the bridge. What I'm going to do is I'm going to loosen all the strings. I'm not even going to take them all off, but at this point, I've left all the extra there so that I can loosen it up. And then I'm going to just remove this white little strip that's here. in the bridge. This is the saddle. I'm going to take that saddle out. And what I will do is I'm going to carefully by hand I'll put a piece of sandpaper on my desk facing up. Then I'm going to put about as equal amount of pressure as possible on this as I carefully begin to sand off some of the bottom of my bridge saddle. I'll do
9:29 that first. and I'm gonna take it in little bits and pieces. Now, here's the thing. You've got to be patient. This isn't Could I potentially get it right the first time? Possibly. But I don't want to go to my extreme to see if I can get as low as I can possibly get it and then overshoot because then what I'm going to be doing is buying a new saddle. Now, that's the worst thing that could happen. By the way, this is a cheap plastic saddle. It's not bone. It's uh it's plastic. So, if I were to wreck it, oh well, buy another one, right? U But what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this out. Then on the very bottom,
10:15 I'm going to use a marker and I'm going to put a little bit of a line on it across so I can try and keep track of how much am I actually taking off. So, I'm going to take just a little bit off. Then I'm going to put it back in. And actually, as much as I've got here, I could I could probably easily take off an eighth of an inch right away. I won't go quite that extreme, but we're going to start by loosening the strings, taking that out, and then you can watch what I'm doing with that. All right. So, that's it. There's your saddle. I'm now going to put just a little mark right across the bottom here.
11:13 I'm using my fingertip fingernail to give myself a straight line. You can see it there. So, I just have this little line across. I'm going to try and remove probably most of that line to start with because I've got so much room here to work with. I'm going to start out here with 100 grit and then I'm going to move to uh well 320. I'll move to a 320. Then I'll move to a 400. I don't want big old grooves on the bottom, but I'm going to start with that. Now, I'm going to try and give equal pressure and keep it straight up and down. and just start to sand that off. I got to be careful not to be tipping it
11:59 this way or tipping it this way because we don't want this to be at an angle. It's got to be straight up and down. You can see my black line there still. It'll take a little bit here. Okay, now I've got it down to where I can just see the top of my black line is barely there yet. Maybe give it just a couple more. I've been doing that for just a few minutes. Didn't figure you wanted to watch me the whole time there, so we jumped ahead. Okay, so that was that. I'm just going to jump over to the
12:45 400 for just a moment here. Just get it smoothed out a little bit. Make sure we're good and flat and smooth. Feels pretty good. I can still see the very top of my black line. Looking at it, it's flat on my desk. Got all sorts of dust there. Let's put it back in and set it up again. Of course, you want to make sure that you have have it going come put them back in the same way you pulled it out. This this side, the side with the thicker strings is going to usually be just slightly deeper than what the uh high string side would be. So, we're going to just drop that in. Push it down in. Yeah, looks like I got
13:32 a good amount off of that. So, I actually took a pretty big jump right away with it just because I knew I had so much. And again, if I mess it up, so I buy a new a new saddle. Oh well, not a big deal. Let's uh tune it up again and see how we're doing. Okay, I got it put back together here once again. I'm going to take a another peek, see how we're doing with our fretboard. That is still looking flat. So, we're we're pretty good there. I'm still a little too high up here yet. Um, it's playing all right. [Music]
14:17 [Applause] [Music] I can even bar chord it. It's not too bad here, but it's still sitting up higher than I would like it here. And I'm not getting any buzz whatsoever with uh fret buzz. So, this is where I said it just takes patience. I'm going to take this back out. I'm going to mark it again. I'm not going to take off as much as I did the first time. Uh but I'm going to take a little bit more off.
15:05 Okay, you can see where I've got the line now. There's a little bit under the line. I'm probably only going to try and bring it up to the line here. Again, always trying to put equal pressure on both sides because you don't want to lower one side or have it either you don't want it to be tilt this way or this way or this way or this way. You want to keep it as flat as possible and keep an even pressure and just check your work every so often. I think this is a job that anybody can really do if you're just going to be patient. You just got to be patient. Take your time
15:52 and if you mess it up, take it into the store. Take it in the Guitar Center for goodness sake. I mean, they can help you out. These things are so cheap, especially the plastic ones. A few bucks. So, it's worth a try to get your guitar playing well. Again, making sure the thicker side is up here on the base end. Okay. And that's about as low as I'm gonna be able to go with that really. So, measuring the height at the 12th fret for an acoustic guitar, you want to be at right about 2.8 millimeters is
16:37 kind of the ideal height for an acoustic. This one's a little above three now. But what I'm noticing is I've pretty much taken the bridge down as much as I can. And at a close inspection of it, I can see this has bubbled up a little bit. So over time, the the spruce of the uh of the front of the guitar has has warped a little bit up. So that's part of the issue with it and why it's high. However, even though that's the case, it actually plays really well down here. Now, my string height for playing for any open chords is just fine. My on my
17:26 I can play I can bar chord a C up here and it's pretty comfortable actually. Um, most people aren't going to bar chord anything higher much higher than a C. Maybe a D, but on an acoustic anyway. Typically, that's not how you play an acoustic. So, and I'm not I'm not fretting out at all. I would like to clean those uh frets a little bit. Well, [Music] for maybe for me, but for a younger person who's just learning how to chord, they probably don't care, right? [Music]
18:14 Thanks for watching, guys. Have a great day. Hope this helps you out a little bit. What is that? something like that. See you. Blessings all. See you next time. [Music] >> And not tomorrow. There's no time to borrow. Today is a good day to live. [Music]
