How To Change Electric Bass Guitar Strings
If I raise the action on my guitar will this change the intonation?
I’ve recently started using my bass guitar again after over 4 years of playing electric guitar because I have an audition for a possible place in a band soon. However, now that I know more about guitars and how they should be set up to suit my style of playing, I’ve realized the action is far too low and if I play hard or tremolo picking then the strings rattle of the frets and give a nasty fret buzz. So my question is if I raise the action a few millimeters will this change the intonation and require me to also have to tweek that? I can raise the action but getting the intonation correct again if it changes is a different story. Thanks in advance.
Like Jake here says – it is not exactly rocket science to adjust the intonation and it is definitely something you want to learn to do yourself. You will probably need to do this at times, if you change string gauge, change the action and so on.
Please observe that you don’t want to adjust the action until you have checked that the neck relief is OK. If the relief is off – in other words you have a back bow or too much up-bow on the neck – then it will be of little or no help to raise the action. That is – you will need to have the action very high to avoid buzzing if the neck is bowed.
You’ll use the neck truss rod to adjust the neck. This is also a straight forward do-it-yourself kind of procedure. However, you may want to have someone showing you how to check the relief and tightening or loosening the truss rod properly and carefully, before you do it yourself.
The procedure for setting this stuff up is as follows:
- Fresh strings
- Adjust neck relief (if needed)
- Adjust action at the bridge (if needed)
- Adjust the action at the saddle (if needed – this is not a hobby kind of task)
- Adjust intonation (if needed)
- Set the height of the individual saddles to match the fretboard radius (if needed and if possible)
- Fine tune intonation and check
A qualified repairer or a luthier will always want to adjust the instrument to match your playing and the strings you use on that particular instrument.
Changing Bass Guitar Strings part 1