New or Used? Ah, it’s finally time to buy a new guitar (and this month is only the third time that time has come!). Sure, you could buy a brand new one, just off the factory guitar. This will not guarantee perfection by any means (we have already covered that here), but paying the full […]

I’m sure this has happened to you too. Sometimes your guitar recklessly frustrates your playing, instead of supporting it. It fights you back. And it doesn’t go better with the tone: it is too thin or not dynamic enough, the unplugged sound is muffled or not consistent string by string. One bending is enough to […]

Is there anything worse than a guitar with tuning stability issues? Probably not, that’s very very frustrating. Typically this issue is addressed with an upgrade on top of the big money already spent for the guitar itself: a good example here would be a set of flashy locking tuners or a better bridge. Sometime we […]

Hi and welcome to The Guitar Corner website. This is the first of a series of six posts that I will dedicate to each step of a basic setup and in each of those I will try to provide some basic information on the guitar components, their function and a quick glance about what a […]

What it is: Although it might not look like, the overall tension that a set of strings generates is about 50 kg (depending on the gauge: can be much much more); therefore, a piece of wood relatively thin as a guitar neck wouldn’t stay even barely in place without twisting, bowing and bending under this […]

What it is: The nut is one of the smallest and most overlooked component of a guitar but it’s also one of the most important. And it’s also where the “conservative approach” of a factory setup is evident. What it does: The nut is in charge of  giving our strings the right spacing and also […]

What it is: Instead of having a fixed bridge, some guitars are equipped with a tremolo, an ingenious system to change the pitch of a note. There are few different models of tremolo, but the most famous are probably the Fender Strat Tremolo and the Floyd Rose system. How it works: Floyd Rose and Fender […]

What it is: The string action is the distance between the bottom of a string and the top of a given fret (taken as a point of reference). Guitars are amazing because are fully customizable on this aspect: some electric guitars even have individually adjustable saddles for each string. Each player has a preference on […]

What it is: Another fully adjustable parameter on an electric guitar is the distance/height of the pickups. Through the two screws on the sides, a pickup can be raised, lowered or inclinated. What it does: The distance of a pickup from the strings has a strong impact on the overall sound, on the balancement of […]

What it is: The intonation of a guitar is the disposition of the note intervals along the fretboard. In other words, a guitar has a correct intonation when, once the open strings are in tune, also all the fretted notes along the fretboard are in tune.This adjustment can be made by moving backward or forward […]