New Sabre setup

[JustinG]

Hello all,

I just took ownership of a beautiful grape slushie Sabre but the action on it gets a little high after the 10th fret. I was wondering how difficult it is to adjust this myself. I’d also like to change the string gauge from 10’s to 9’s. I’m a little nervous to mess with things but I’d love to learn how to do this. Any advice or videos out there I should check out or am I better off bringing it to a pro for a setup?

 

[MarkF786]

I'd say it depends on your technical aptitude and/or if it's something you want to learn. It's not that hard. Music Man's FAQ provides instructions on setting up their guitars. With what you're describing, you'd just need to adjust the saddles (for string height) and truss rod (if you change string gauge), and the guitar should have included both tools you'd need. I'd recommend also getting a string height gauge and feeler gauges, both of which aren't too expensive.

If you want to learn more about doing guitar setups for many different types of guitars, I'd recommend this book: How to Make Your Electric Guitar Play Great!

 

[DrKev]

It's not rocket science, or brain surgery. Or even rocket surgery. Doing a guitar setup is safer and easier than making a bacon sandwich, I promise.

I'd recommend gathering/buying the basic tools. Trying to make do with old or badly sized tools is never gonna work out well and you do not want to damage a beautiful guitar by using the wrong tools for the job. You should have a 6" steel engineers rule, No's 1 and 2 phillips and slot head screwdrivers, a set of metric and imperial allen wrenches, string cutters. There are ready-made kits out there (Cruztools Groovetech kit, Music Nomad have kits, and I use the Ernie Ball Musicians toolkit which I added feeler gauges and a capo for neck relief measurements).

The book @MarkF786 recommends is excellent, but contains a lot of info you may never need too. Depends on how many of what style guitars you may ever run into. There are lots of other great resources out there too. There are setup guides for strat/tele/bass on the Fender website that are basically unchanged for 25 years and is still a great runthrough of everything you need to know and do. I recommend printing them out and staple them or stick them in a folder. And remember that any specifications or numbers that anyone recommends are guidelines rather than targets.

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