Rule out the strings
Old, damaged, poorly installed, or mismatched strings can imitate setup problems and make every measurement less useful.
Diagnose before you adjust
Fix a Guitar
A guitar setup is a chain. Relief changes action, action affects feel, strings affect tension, and intonation comes last. This path keeps you from fixing one problem by creating another.
How to use this path
Make one change at a time, retune, and test it. Moving the truss rod, saddles, and nut together does not make the job faster; it only destroys the evidence that tells you which change mattered.
Tune it accurately
A tuning or intonation complaint cannot be diagnosed with a pitch reference that drifts or guesses the wrong octave.
Work through the setup in order
Check relief first, then action, nut height, pickup height, and finally intonation. The sequence matters.
Use buzz as evidence
Where the buzz appears tells you far more than the fact that it exists. Narrow the cause before raising everything.
Set intonation last
Learn what the saddle adjustment can correct, what it cannot, and why the nut can make the first few frets lie.
Check the electronics separately
Hum, weak output, cutting out, and scratchy controls follow a different signal path than mechanical setup problems.
Do not treat this like homework.
Open the next step when the current one answers a question you actually have. The order is here to keep later explanations from depending on something that was never made clear.
Last reviewed: August 2026
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