Been playing for 7 months now, I own 2 electrics. I recently bought a Vintage V500 electric/acoustic to bang away on as I could'nt always be assed plugging in.
It came with very heavy strings 12/13's I think. Anyway the shop recommended taking the bridge down a bit and switching the strings to Martin 80/20 bronze light, which I duly did. The guitar sounds lovely and is easy to play for my wimpy electric playing fingers.
However today I noticed the the wound g-string (oh arrrr Matron), has little cuts at the frets towards the headstock end. This is only on G string and the guitar still sounds good and plays no probs. Any one know whats going on with it.
And a 1-2-3-4.
Maybe the action was lowered too much so the string's scraping the fret?
Well we all shine on--like the moon and the stars and the sun.
-- John Lennon
Strings and frets are both made of metal, and both are pretty hard. Still, one's gonna be harder than the other... and the softer one is going to dent (at least microscopically) every time you fret.
There's such a huge range of metals used in frets (usually nickel steel, sometimes stainless) and strings (usually nickel steel, bronze, etc.), but in general the strings will be harder - even if both are the same material, the string has been 'drawn', which makes it harder.
On wound strings, you've also got some 'sawing' action going on - when you fret a string, it touches the fretwire, but continues to stretch a bit as you pull the string to the fretboard, so the windings rub against the fret.
The bottom line is that over time, frets wear. At a certain point, frets will wear enough to affect the string angle - it'll start to buzz against frets higher up on the neck. Then it's time to have them 'leveled' - the higher frets get filed down a bit. If there's not enough fret material left for leveling, you'll need a refret job.
To minimize fret wear, you can do two things... first, don't press the strings any harder than you have to. Second, play in all keys and positions - that'll even out the wear.
Other than that, don't worry about it. It happens to all guitars eventually.
Guitar teacher offering lessons in Plainfield IL
Errrm no the g-string has little dents/notches in it. The guitar is 2 weeks old the strings 1 week. The indents are only on the g-string and the guitar plays fine the frets themselves are fine and smooth. I have never seen this happen on my electric guitars strings.
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And a 1-2-3-4.
I have a similar thing happening on my Fender acoustic. While mine is approx 6 months old and my actual hands on time has been approx 3 months. My G string is notched at every fret. All the other strings are fine. It still sounds fine (for my untrained ears) but I am probably in need of a complete string change anyway- They are still the original strings.
I put the increased marking on the G string down to a particular training riff I had been learnign early on that worked up and down the G string. With my heavy handedness of being a beginner, I figured that I was probably pushing / pressing harder than required andtrying some bends/ Hammer ons and Pull offs probably contributed. I checked the action on the High and Low E and it sits around the 7/64" at the 12th Fret. I too have rather heavy strings on the guitar. I was sort of hoping that upon measurement, I would find the action was way too high and I could get it reduced to make the fretting a little lighter on the fingers. Alas...from what I have read, the action sounds normal....
I wouldnt worry too much about the notches at this point. Monitor them to ensure you know where they are at, but if it isnt affecting sound? enjoy.
cheers
Mick
Are you sure that they are actually cuts?
The winding on a wound G string is pretty fine and I would have thought that if it were actually cut at all it would start unwinding.
When I first started out (also with a wound G) I used to get a sort of stripey effect at some of the frets. I don't seem to get it now though.
As far as I could tell, what was happening for me was that my rather heavyweight approach was polishing the strings and preventing them from tarnishing as they rubbed backwards and forwards across the frets. The rest of the bronze tarnished pretty quickly. This difference in colour gave it the appearance of the string being more "notched" at the fret than it actually was.
When the guitar was set up at the store did they miss a fret when they polished the frets?
Joe
