Because so many people contact me with the question “do you work on acoustic guitars?”, I decided to make a separate page for the work I do with acoustic guitars – steel string, electro acoustic, resonator and nylon string. The vast majority of acoustic instruments that cross my bench are owned by people who predominantly play electric guitar and they have an acoustic guitar which, as they’re more used to a Strat or a Les Paul, they find unforgiving as the action is too high and they tend to strum cowboy chords down by the nut. I can’t work miracles, but on a guitar that’s been looked after, they usually leave my workshop with actions as low as this: Twenty years ago, I schlepped my Morris F18 acoustic (an 1980s Japanese take on a Martin 00018) around the London repair shops (some of them very famous) to the same answer: if the saddle were lowered, yes the action would be improved, but the “break angle” (the angle at which the strings emerge from the bridge holes and go over the top ofthe saddle on their journey to the headstock) would be shallower and I would lose tone. Here’s a high break angle on a nylon strung concert guitar (the guitar has a very high action). I asked one shop to set it up and when I collected it two months later, I couldn’t feel a discernible difference. But I paid up and gnashed my teeth in private. But then I put my design engineer hat on and, with the aid of the trigonometry I hadn’t used for a while, calculated the saddle height for the optimal low action. I still use this calculation today, which helps me achieve actions this low without rattle or hum: And you know what? You don’t lose THAT much tone. My feeling is it’s better to lose a bit of tone and get a guitar that’s comfortable to play, rather than being a slave to sonic integrity and tolerating a high action on a guitar that never comes out of its case to be played. My customers tell me their acoustic guitars leave my workbench with lower actions than a lot of their electricguitars. I can’t work miracles (I can’t tress this enough!), but if the guitar’s top hasn’t “bellied” and the neck hasn’t started to lift towards the body, I can usually make the guitar a more pleasurable experience to play. Even this one – ever heard of a guitar brand called Groove? – which my customer was about to throw in a skip but I repaired the bridge (which had a badly cut saddle slot which had been cut twice, leaving one slot superimposed on the other like a very shallow “X”), lowered the nut slots, adjusted a very delicate truss rod and he couldn’t believe the result. It’s odd how a little thing can like a few thousands of an inch can upset something on a guitar. I had a Takamine electro-acoustic in for a set up (it went out with an action of 0.054” on the bass E 12th, a lot lower than it came in with). When amplified, the bass E string was significantly quieter than the rest of the strings. The culprit was the saddle. One of the feet that contacts the piezo was 0.003” shorterthan the other four (the average human hair is 0.002″ thick). I swapped the saddle around and the G string was lower volume, which confirmed my suspicions. The pen is pointing to the short foot. The foot has to sit and put pressure on the contact strip in the piezo: So I put on a tiny bit of copper foil, which I measured and it was 0.004” thick, on the offending foot: And it was fine. My customer was really chuffed and loved he’d got his bass E back and his new low action (see pic at top of this page). This customer was having problems with his Ovation, as when it was plugged in, the treble E and B strings sounded like a sitar. Here was the problem: The plastic saddle has to sit in the channel of the piezo and the channel was too long and the feet of the saddle couldn’t “bottom” out on the piezo’s contact strip. So I had to carefully grind down the channel in situ so the saddle would sit properly. I also do resonator guitars. For reasons I’ve never quite fathomed, resonator playersfavour an action you could drive a double decker bus under. And hugely thick strings (I can see the point of those). However, it’s unlikely most guitar players are going to use a resonator guitar to slash out a rendition of Robert Johnson’s Stones In My Passway in a Mississippi juke joint in order to penetrate the din of the knife fight that’s just broken out. More likely you’ll play the resonator sat on your sofa and want a compromise action that’s low enough for finger style and high enough for slide. This nice Michael Messer Lightning resonator was a regular customer’s eBay impulse, as I’d once mentioned that I’ve played National Style Os (originals and reissues) and these MM Lightnings are the nearest you’ll get – same body shape, bell brass (rather than steel) slotted headstock, nickel plated (rather than chrome) big chunky neck, same cone system – at a fraction of the cost. This is how high the action was at the 12th fret – off the scale of my ready reckoner gauge! Lowering theaction means lowering the grooves in the biscuit saddle: Crude measures for what are, let’s face it, crude guitars (and therein lies their charm – and lonesome tone). This is what lurks under the cone: My customer also wanted the fingerboard dyed darker (it was a weird grey colour). The best way to do this is carefully apply oil-based penetrating dye to the fingerboard (approach oil dye with SERIOUS caution) but the binding would need to be scraped back to remove the dye. But the the binding had the chatter marks of the cutter that trimmed it back to the fingerboard, so scraping it back made it much smoother to the touch. And then trim the excess material from the top of the biscuit bridge (the strings should sit in very shallow grooves) and the action lowered by half – from 0.140″ to 0.70″. If you have an acoustic you don’t play because it’s badly set up, please .