If you unwrapped a new guitar this Christmas, or your dad gave you his old one, you probably need to have it professionally set up. A good guitar set-up can mean the difference between a buzzing, hard-to-play nightmare that kills your fingers and ears, and a beautiful musical instrument.
What to do when you get your first guitar
“The better a guitar is set up, the easier it is to play, which speeds up your learning curve,” explains Matt Chapman, a Los Angeles-based luthier and former guitar shop owner with more than 20 years of experience building and repairing guitars.
A guitar tune-up is like routine maintenance on your car or a visit to the doctor for a check-up: a thorough check-up by a professional that makes minor adjustments to make your guitar easier to play and sound better. Almost any guitar shop will tune your guitar or refer you to someone who can.
A guitar is a delicate thing. It’s basically wood under high tension from taut steel strings, so a lot can go wrong, even from the factory to your living room. Changes in temperature and humidity can subtly affect the wood, and just constantly pulling on the strings will bend the wood, changing the distance from the strings to the fretboard and slightly altering your guitar’s tuning. A setup will get everything back in order so that your guitar plays as well as it can. “When you’re a beginner, there’s nothing more off-putting than a clunky instrument,” Chapman says.
