Seeing Beyond the Set-Up

I was reading Guitar Player magazine recently and noticed again something I have noticed there before that bothers me.  Every issue contains reviews of gear, including guitars.  The reviewers talk about the distinctive points of various instruments, their pros and cons and good and bad qualities.  And often, in the course of the review, will be a comment on how well the guitar played out of the box, or a note that it needed thing X adjusted.

This is at best unnecessary information, and at worst downright misleading, and here's why:

On any guitar, especially electric guitars, there are a number of parameters that can be adjusted to make the guitar play its best.  Dialing in these variables is known as "setting up" a guitar, and the resultant condition is called the "set-up" of the guitar.  Generally when a guitar is set up well it will play easily all the way up and down the neck, without buzzing frets or choked notes.  Among the factors that go into a set-up are string height (adjusted by raising or lowering the bridge, and also sometimes by the depth of the slots in the nut), neck relief (how much the neck bends under string pressure, which can be adjusted in most guitars by loosening or tightening a "truss rod" in the neck), intonation (adjustable on many guitars by how the bridge saddles are positioned), and, on electrics, pickup height.  There are other adjustments that can be made on a guitar with a vibrato bridge.  Not all guitars have all of these adjustments available, but most electrics do.

Most guitars don't arrive from the factory with the perfect set-up, for a couple reasons.  First, set-ups are subjective, so many manufacturers error on the side of high action because it's easier and more forgiving of heavy-handed play.  And, a set-up can change due to things like heat and humidity, or just getting bumped around a lot, so the set-up when a guitar arrives at its final destination may well be different than what it had when it left the factory.  This is also another reason that the factory may not want to dial things in too closely before shipment.

There was a time when (in theory) the retailer would tweak the set-up of new instruments when they arrived, before putting them out on the sales floor, and some still do.  But "big box" retailers tend to do less of that, and with so many instruments being sold on-line now, it is quite possible that nobody will have touched a new guitar between the factory and the ultimate owner, although it can get shipped back and forth across the country (or the world) a few times in the interim.

So, nobody should EXPECT a new guitar to play that great when they pick it up.  Of course, some do, and it's always great when you find one.  But it's important to be able to look beyond the set-up when evaluating a guitar.  So when Guitar Player (and they are not the only culprit; just the one I saw most recently) suggests in a review that it matters that a guitar played great out of the box, or that it's a bad thing that it needed a truss rod adjustment when it arrived, they are doing their readers a disservice.

To be a really savvy guitar shopper, it's important to learn to see beyond the set-up of a guitar you're trying out.  Think about:  how does it feel ergonomically?  (Not the actual action; the other stuff like how does it hang on your shoulder, how does the carve of the neck feel under your hand, etc.)  How does it sound?  Assuming it CAN be adjusted, how it plays can be dialed in later, if everything else is good.  I suspect most reputable dealers would either set it up for you as part of the purchase or allow a purchase contingent on it being set-up-able.

There are plenty of red flags to look for with a new guitar, and some may not reveal themselves until the guitar is set up, such as low or high frets.  But if you assume any new guitar is going to need a set-up, and look beyond those issues in initial evaluation, you are less likely to lose out on a great guitar that just needed a truss-rod adjustment.