Hi Guys, first post from me so hi to everyone! Im Dave from the UK.
I recently bought a Jackson SLATTXMG 3-6 Soloist guitar, brand new. It was stung with 11's which are a bit to heavy for my liking so I changed them to Hybrid Slinky's and set up the guitar again.
My problem is, I cant seem to get the action down towards the bridge end. If i lower it to where I would want it it buzzes like crazy from the 12th fret onwards, more so the E,A,D strings. The G,B,E are not to bad, but could be lower for my liking. I would say the action is about 2.5 / 3mm on the thicker strings, 2mm(ish) on the thinner.
At the nut the action is nice and low, with no buzz. My first thought was the neck, but if I check the neck relief id say it is ok (maybe in wrong), if I cappo the 1st fret and hold down the last fret. Around the 8th fretI can just slip a business card under.
Any help that anyone could offer would be much appreciated. The guitar is playable but but I feel it could be better. Tuning and intonation are both fine.
Thank you Dave,
Hi Dave,
Guitar actions can be a real pain in the backside. There are 5 major things that affect how low an action can go.
1. Nut height
2. Bridge height
3. Neck bow
4. Neck pitch (or angle)
5. How even the frets are.
With your guitar, lets eliminate 1, 2,4 and 5 for now...you have stated its good at the nut, you are adjusting the bridge, so thats fine...Neck pitch we cant do anything about because your guitar has a set neck,and the frets we wont deal with because its not something a person could easily instruct how to fix on a forum like this.
That leaves us with Neck bow.
If the guitar is playing fine on the lower frets, but buzzing out on the higher ones, I would suggest the neck has either too much bow or the pitch angle is wrong, or a mixture of both. It sounds like you have the neck bow at a good setting, but you might try tightening the truss rod another quarter of a turn and raising the action a fraction and see if that cleans up the problem. Quite often, too much bow will cause the angle to be all wrong on the higher frets.
There is a 6th issue with actions...and that is that sometimes the expectation of how low you want your guitar action to be is sometimes just not reachable without MAJOR work.
If straightening the neck a fraction more doesnt work, you might need to visit a repairer.
