Fender string height specs are in the table below:. If you have your pickups too close to the strings the magnetic pull will cause the strings to vibrate in an elliptical pattern instead of a circular pattern which results in problems with the guitars tone and loss of harmonics. You want your pickups close enough to have good output but not so close as to affect the vibration of the strings.
To perform the measurement simply take your ruler and measure the distance from the top of the pole piece to the bottom of the string on the first high E and sixth Low E strings of the guitar.
After you make this adjustment you will see that the pickup will be angled closer to the 1st string and farther away from the 6th. I like to move the pickups quite far away from the strings and listen to how the string sounds through an amplifier with0ut any influence from the magnetic pull of the pickups. Then I like to raise the pickups until they are very close to the strings and listen to how the magnetic pull causes tonal changes and loss of sustain.
Then I back the pickups off until I can hear that they are no longer influencing the vibration of the string. Lace Sensor pickups have little to no magnetic pull on the string. I would also suggest pulling them away from the strings a little bit and listen to the difference in sound. You may like them a little farther away from the strings.
Intonation affects how well your guitar plays in tune along the entire length of the fretboard. Have you ever noticed that after you tune your guitar it still sounds off when you play chords or notes and the higher you go on the neck the worse it sounds? In theory, the distance from the inside of the nut of the guitar to the middle of the 12th fretwire should measure the same distance as the middle of 12th fretwire to the bridge saddle.
But, if you do this adjustment by measuring with a ruler it will still sound off. So, we have to adjust the intonation with a good tuner or you can simply use your ear if you have a good ear. Before you adjust intonation make sure all your other adjustments are done. That means truss rod, string height action , pickup height and tremolo height all have to completed before you do intonation.
To adjust the intonation tune your strings to standard tuning. Then starting at the 6th string play the open string and the play the note an octave higher at the 12th fret. The pitch should be the same. Your ear, or tuner will tell you if the octave note is sharp or flat.
If the note is sharp use a Phillips screwdriver and move the bridge saddle farther away from the nut or toward the back of the bridge plate. If the note is flat, move the bridge saddle closer to the nut or the front of the bridge plate.
Adjust the bridge saddle to compensate for flatness or sharpness until the note at the 12th fret is in tune with the open string note. Do the same for all six strings and your guitar will be properly intonated. Once you have completed all the above adjustments your Stratocaster should play very comfortably and stay in tune very well. Whenever you change strings I would check all the adjustments and adjust any that are out.
Leave any questions or comments in the comment section below. Your email address will not be published. This setup guide is based on the American Stratocaster series. Click here to search for an American Deluxe or Ultra Stratocaster Before you start adjusting: Be sure that you take a measurement of all settings before you adjust anything.
If you are never playing any notes above the i. Any potential fret buzz higher up will not be a problem for you. After adjusting the action from a low and high neck position, you must verify the action and fret buzz halfway on the neck.
Play with regular strength and pick attack. See if you must increase the bridge saddles or if you can possibly lower them. One of the advantages with vintage guitars is the worn neck wood. The worn wood and lacqer is smoother to play.
Newer necks and fretboards with glossy lacquer will create lots of friction, particularly when your hands are warm and sweaty. Lots of friction between fingers and fretboard will limit your playing a lot and makes it difficult to play aggressive solos with strings bends and shakes. It will feel like your strings are thicker and harder to bend. We recommend sanding one-piece maple necks with sand paper to partly remove the glossy lacquer. We also recommend sanding the back side of the neck to allow smooth and friction-less change of grips.
You can move up and down the neck fast and precisely. Use a fine grained sand paper. Needless to say. If you play chords and licks high up on the neck, you need to adjust the intonation or else the guitar will sound of tune. An important step for tone. It is crucial that you inspect and adjust the pickup height after adjusting the truss rod and string action nut and bridge saddles.
Pickup height adjustment is an iterative process that can take weeks depending on neck tension and potential truss rod adjustment. Depending on how hot the pickups are magnet strength, number of windings you need to adjust the distance accordingly.
Treble side: 2. Bass side: 2. Start with the bass side. Press down the low E against the last fret and measure the gap between the pickup magnet pole and the bottom side of the string. Repeat for treble side, the high E string.
This is the starting point and from now you must adjust be ear. We feel it is better to have the pickups far away than close. When we adjust by ear we are playing chords and licks with the neck, mid and bridge pickup until the balance gets right. The three different pickup positions shall all sound equally loud in our opinion, but we know many who want to increase the volume on the bridge or neck pickup since they use these for solos.
This is amp tremolo, by definition. Vibrato is an adjustment of frequency. Tremolo is volume. Personally we adjust the tension of the five vibrato springs on the back side so that there is a little gap between the tremolo bridge and the guitar body.
We like the vibrato to go both ways, mostly down but also a little up. Some people claims that the sustain is improved this way, and we can agree to that to some extent, but we still prefer a vibrato movement in both directions. Good sustain must be ensured by having a quality bridge Callaham, for example and good body and neck wood.
We also sand away the lacquer below the tremolo bridge where the screws enter the body, especially for Acryl based lacquer. A very important step. It is also important to keep the nut slot wide and smooth enough to prevent the strings to get stuck and locked. Use sand paper and verify that the strings are allowed to slide smoothly back and forth in the nut slot.
You may even use wounded strings to file the nut with. Use a low E-string for the A nut slot, an A-string for the D nut slot and so on. If the nut slot is too tight and narrow, i. A tight and sticky nut is one of the things that really annoys us with new guitars. A worn and well played nut with correct string action is extremely valuable to us. This makes the strings slide smoothly and even allows us to do deep Hendrix dives without the guitar getting way out of tune.
Of course the strings must be properly stretched and the tuners must work perfect for this to work. The stratocaster has had maple necks since the very beginning. In they also offered the option of having a rosewood fretboard on top of the maple neck, a so-called rosewood slab board.
The advantages were less friction between fingers and wood and less wear with the more robust rosewood. It is a rule of thumb that rosewood necks are generally darker sounding than maple necks. There are many individual factors in each neck that can make both rosewood and maple necks bright and dark.
Two necks coming from different maple trees can naturally have different density, stiffness, humidity and weight. Even two necks coming from the same tree can be different because of where and how the wooden plates are cut from the tree.
The initial pick attack and string vibration will make the neck wood vibrate. Depending on which frequencies that resonates well in a particular neck the strings will eventually vibrate at other frequencies in addition to the initial note.
The neck is acting like a frequency filter and working together with the strings to produce a complex blend of frequencies. A general observation from our side is that a neck with a medium fat profile thicker than the USA standard strat will more likely resonate well and give a nicely sustained tone than a thin neck. Also, the thinnest necks do not have enough back side support for the left hand. But one must be careful to suit the size of your hands and fingers.
Remember that playability is more important than tone — great guitarists appear to sound great through most equipment. We must also add that the we personally find straight necks most comfortable, offering good sustain and a consistent low action across the whole neck length.
Weight, tension, distance to pickups, fret action. Thicker strings are darker and fuller sounding and have more sustain. New strings sound superior to older strings that are lubricated with fat and finger dirt. Change strings often if you care about tone and always wash your hands before playing your guitars.
The closer the string vibrates to the pickup pole, the louder and more trebly the tone will be. Being to close may cause the magnetic field to prevent the string vibration, hence reduce sustain. The pitch may also change and the intonation gets false. Keep the distance! A very low fret action may cause the strings to collide with the highest frets while playing.
This is very undesirable since the string will not vibrate freely after the initial pick attack. The physical pickup nature or magnetic power, coil resistance and inductance. Pickups are heavily discussed elsewhere, and we dare not start a discussion here. One must make sure that the pickups match the other guitar parts and components. A dark sounding neck should not be used with a dark body or pickups since you will get a muddy and lifeless tone.
On the other hand, a bright and sparkling body might come through very harsh if the pickups are also bright. You need to maintain balance between these. Pickups are easy to swap and you should experiment with different brands and models and try to adjust pickup height. Remember that the pickup height alters the tone. The closer the more treble, attack and volume you get.
Electrical circuitry and components — explained below. Tremolo bridge. Saddles, spring tension, fixed one-way vs floating bridge.
A quality tremolo bridge is important for the sustain. So I pushed on the whammy bar to have the tremolo piece sit against the body and I screwed in those screws until they reached the metal to see what happened.
This stopped the tremolo from moving up and down that screw and now the tremolo looks parallel with the body. It floats and moves smoothly. This however, messed up the action on my guitar and I was getting buzzing in all strings. So I started playing on the strings, plucks and bends and then adjusting the saddles until the buzzing was nearly imperceptible. By the time I finished, the guitar was basically buzz free, the tremolo moving smoothly and the action was reasonable I wish it was lower, but maybe for that I will need to adjust the truss rod a bit.
I don't know if that will help however, and I can probably deal with the way it is now. One thing I can't stand is buzzing on the strings. The fender manual says it should be.
The measurement I have there is clearly way too high. Anyways, it'd be nice to not have to deal with this stuff ever and just be able to play from day one. I just got a brand new Stratocaster Deluxe and I tried to screw in the tremelo bar but there doesn't seem to be any threaded receptacle for it in the bar.
Am I missing something. I looked down the hole and it is smooth. I see a screw that can be driven in with a hex tool. Is that really how they expect to install a tremelo bar? Hi Daniel. Please see this Youtube link. It gives the perfect solution. What a great tutorial! Took two springs off; can you use four, or would it make the pull uneven?
Thanks, pjtrenthem. I think you should be OK with 4 springs. It might be a little stiffer than using 3, but that might be what you want.
As for pulling uneven, I have heard of some guys adjusting the claw so that it's farther in at one end to compensate for this. Not something I've ever needed to do, but you might want to play about with it if you do feel that a straight claw angle feels uneven to you. Let me know how you get on and what ends up working best for you.
I've got a question about adding springs. When you say that "it" might be a little stiffer, are you talking about the tremolo operation or the feel of the strings. I use 10's with 3 springs. I like to bend strings and wanted to possibly add a 4th spring but don't want to add too much tension on the strings to tear up my fingers My reasoning for adding a 4th spring was to prevent tuning issues due to string bending but I certainly don't want to make string bends painful due to string tension.
Wanted to say that this is a great thread Hey, sorry for the delayed reply. I was specifically referring to the stiffness of the tremolo itself, but you may or may not notice a difference in the strings themselves, since there is a bit less "give".
Honestly, though, I'd recommend you just try it and see how you feel. As for the stud height, well this is exactly how certain other tremolos are set up some Wilkinson models, for example.
Basically, they recommend setting up the saddles to the right radius, and then you can move the studs up and down to change the height, which is obviously a lot easier once the initial radius is set up.
Hi, I've just purchased a standard strat and wanted to set the tremolo to be flush with the body, i. I loosened all the strings so that the tremolo sat flat against the body, but have noticed that the mechanism in the back of the guitar is not parallel the claw screws are lop sided. I've tried screwing the claw screws in the same amount to make it parallel, but the bottom part high E of the tremolo is sitting marginally higher than the top part low E when you look along the guitar from bridge to nut.
With this affect tuning and potentially worse things, i. Hi Greg. I think I know what you're describing, but could you possibly link to a photo or two to clarify? If it's what I think, then I don't think you should feel bad about adjusting the claw at a slight angle if that's what you need to do. Sometimes the spring tension isn't quite the same between the springs, or other times there's just a bit of a difference due to the claw not being perfectly centered, etc.
In these cases, an angled claw could well be the solution. So an angled claw won't be as bad as suggested? Do you think this will bring the tremolo level? Hey Greg, firstly it really doesn't look that bad to me.
I wouldn't be particularly concerned about either that bridge angle or the claw angle. I've seen much worse. Secondly, the spring tensions and therefore the claw angle shouldn't really come into play here though I could see how some twisting might go on.
I'd be checking the front of your bridge first to see if it's level. If it is, then there's a chance the bridge itself is slightly warped, and quite honestly I wouldn't be overly concerned about this. However, adjusting the stud height at one side of the front of the bridge should be more directly connected to how the bridge sits including at the back. I'm assuming it's a two-stud tremolo. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Sounds huge. Does anybody really do this?
It says 0. Where and how is it measuring? Top of the bridge plate from the body surface? Good questions, Anonymous. For where to measure, I'm going from the underside of the plate, near the back just before it starts suddenly curving up.
That ruler is metric along one edge, and along the other a Chinese measurement called "cun" that looks like inches, but each unit is in fact approximately one tenth of a foot or 3 cm.
I've made mention of it on some other posts, but not on this one. Sorry for any confusion. Hi, I'm poor, so I got a Chinese Strat. I'm having a hard time getting it in tune. It seems I have to move the saddles all the way back to the bridge plate, and then the saddle springs get in the way.
Is it advisable to remove the saddle springs? Why are they really needed anyway? Or should I look for smaller saddles? Right now the guitar has the large rectangular saddles like you have in the picture. Also, what do you recommend for string height at the saddle end? I wouldn't worry too much about removing a spring or two although I'd advise you to store them safely somewhere just in case you need them later.
Things to watch out for: 1. Since there is no spring to push the saddle forward, you'll need to make sure it's in the right position when you string it up. If you tighten the saddle ALL the way to the back, it will hit the back edge of the tremolo base plate and this may make it rise up in the air a little i.
Make sure that's not happening. Good luck! I have problem with my fender deluxe 2points synchronized tremolo. When the tremolo move to guitar body to the right side , he can not return to the starting position. The guitar does not stay in the pitch. To the guitar back in the pitch is necessary to move the tremolo in the opposite direction.
I tried to balance the tension of the springs to the tension of the strings, but i failed
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