Guitar Setup & Maintenance

Clean, restring and set up your own acoustic or Strat-style electric: neck relief, nut, saddle and action, tremolo, intonation and pickup height.

What you will be able to play

• Clean an acoustic or electric guitar with the strings off without grinding grit into the finish.
• Restring an acoustic or a tremolo electric with the tie method and stretch the strings until they hold pitch.
• Check an acoustic top with a straight edge and humidify a dry guitar or dry out a bloated one.
• Measure neck relief with a capo and feeler gauge and turn the truss rod a quarter turn at a time.
• Check nut height with a feeler gauge at the 1st fret and file a high acoustic nut slot safely.
• Lower acoustic action by measuring at the 12th fret and sanding the saddle flat and square.
• Set a Strat tremolo to a 1/8-inch gap and the action to 4/64 inch at the 17th fret.
• Set intonation at the 12th fret and pickup height from the pole piece to the string.

Is it for you?

Anyone with a steel-string acoustic or a Stratocaster-style electric who wants to clean, restring and set up the guitar themselves and understand why it plays the way it does. No playing skills are needed; you should be able to tune with an electronic tuner and be careful with a screwdriver and an Allen key. The electric lessons use Fender Stratocaster specs and parts (two-screw and six-screw tremolos, saddle grub screws, micro-tilt), so owners of other electrics get the method but should use their own maker's specs. It does not cover fret work, wiring or structural repairs.

What you get

• 23 video lessons in teaching order
• Taught by Finbar, David Taub
• Level: Beginner to intermediate
• Watch on the web or in the GuitarJamz app, on any device, with your progress kept
• Yours to keep: one payment, no subscription
• Backed by our money-back guarantee

After checkout, sign in at members.guitarjamz.com with the email you bought with. Your access is ready within minutes, on the web and in the GuitarJamz app.