Setup For A Heavyweight
Work On Your Bass
My customer Mike Doughty brought in a brand new candy-apple red Fender Deluxe Active Jazz Bass V for a setup. He had just purchased the bass and was having difficulty playing it because the action was high compared to several other basses he’s played for years (none of them 5-string). All of us in the shop agreed it would take at least three musicians to play this bass—one to support the instrument’s weight, one to pull back on the neck to bring the strings closer to the fingerboard, and a third to pluck the strings.
For the most part, Mike’s bass simply needed a good setup. (It did have an uncommon nut issue, which I describe below, but most of you won’t run into that with a new instrument.) After a couple hours’ work, we sent Mike off to his gig with a big smile on his face. Nothing we did was beyond the range of what you can do at home (aside from the nut work, perhaps). Here’s exactly what we did, and how we did it:
Fig. 1 I played the bass (or at least I tried to). Then I checked the neck for straightness and found more relief (i.e., upbow toward the strings) than I like to see—well over 1/16".
Fig. 2 The action at the 12th fret measured 5/32"—I knew it would go lower.
Fig. 3 The fingerboard radius was 91/2", yet the bridge radius was 20". I prefer to see the same radius under the strings at the bridge saddles that I measure on the fingerboard.
Fig. 4 Straightening the neck took a scary amount of trussrod tightening, but I got it under control. First I removed the trussrod adjusting nut and lubed it with petroleum jelly. Next I “helped” the trussrod do its job by clamping the neck into a slight back-bow with the trussrod nut loose before tightening the nut. I got the neck straight as an arrow, and then I backed it off for a tad of relief (not as much as Fender specs call for, but some). In my opinion, straight necks sound best, so if you can level the frets so they don’t buzz when the neck is straight, you should be happy.
Fig. 5 Once the neck was straight, the D and A strings buzzed on the 1st fret. That was because the nut’s string slots were filed for low action, which may have been fine with that heavy up-bow. In the photo, my shop-mate Jonah Powell is sliding a .008" guitar string between the D string and the 1st fret to measure clearance. There wasn’t enough clearance for the string not to buzz on the fret.
Fig. 6 The B, E, and G strings weren’t too low, however—we measured about .020" of clearance between the bottom of the string and the top of the 1st fret. It was those damn middle strings that buzzed.
Fig. 7 Also, the nut was sitting uneven in its nut slot. The bad fit, combined with the fact that the nut was too low, prompted us to replace it with a Stewart-MacDonald nut made from vintage bone.
Fig. 8 Jonah used a string-spacing rule to lay out the string spacing. The rule spaces the strings proportionally, taking into account the strings’ diameters—as opposed to each string being the same exact distance from its adjacent strings. It’s a subtle, but real, difference.
Fig. 9 Jonah used our Peterson VS-II tuner to check the intonation—it was right on from the factory, which made us feel good about this bass (score for Fender).
Fig. 10 Mike, a veteran of the Athens, Ohio music scene, was then ready for his busy weekend gig schedule.
