january 2011

Resetting the neck angle and replacing the neck

A 1952 goldtop Les Paul! Acoustically, this model sounds spectacular and, thanks to its P-90 soapbar pickups, it projects an iconic amplified sound. But it’s not perfect: In last month’s column, we discussed how the 1952 and early ’53 goldtops aren’t really playable as a professional instrument because of their shallow neck set.

When one arrived at my shop recently, we could immediately see it had problems. Its bridge was bottomed out, yet even with very little relief, there was a 1/4" gap between the top of the 12th fret and the underside of the low E string. This guitar was no longer 100-percent original, as it had been converted from its trapeze tailpiece to an ABR-1 bridge and stop tailpiece years before it reached us. Clearly, by correcting the neck angle on this goldtop, we’d turn it into a more playable and usable instrument. Because of its previous alterations, we wouldn’t be devaluing the guitar in terms of collectability, but rather giving it the life it was originally intended to have.

As I described in last month’s column, removing the neck took a great deal of preparation and patience. We pulled three of the upper frets and drilled six holes in the fret slots. To separate the neck from the body, we had to inject boiling water into these holes for five days, and then apply steam to the sides and underside of the neck heel with StewMac’s Neck Joint Steamer Needle.

The neck came off fairly cleanly, but before I could refit it, I needed to remove some hide-glue residue with a moist cloth and chisel. Then I carefully trimmed the inside lower heel using a chisel, flat file, and a small sanding block that I cut from a sheet of Corian.

To finalize the angle, I used 220-grit sandpaper stuck to the Corian. This made for a very clean and flush heel-to-body joint. During the trimming, I clamped the neck in my StewMac Guitar Repair Vise. Available from stewmac.com (item #1813), this vise features rotating hardwood jaws and a forgiving urethane surface to hold instruments of any shape and size. It’s a must-have for our shop.


LEFT: Resetting the neck angle requires careful measurements.
RIGHT: The Honduran mahogany shim that will determine the neck angle.


LEFT: The finished neck tenon and fretboard wing shims glued in place.
RIGHT: Using a .002” feeler gauge to ensure there’s no space between the reset neck and body.

I referenced the neck-joint fit and angle by going back and forth with the body, using thin mahogany strips as spacers/shims under the end of the tenon as I adjusted for the correct neck angle. After I achieved a quality fit, I held the neck and body together using two grip clamps and a custom-made fretboard-clamping caul. Made of hard-rock maple, my fretboard caul has a 12"-radius bottom surface that’s slotted with channels to accommodate the frets and covered with a 1/16" cork surface.

Next, I tensioned up the outer two strings, checking for neck pitch, vertical alignment, and downward adjustment of the ABR-1 bridge. Once I’d established the neck angle, I cut a Honduran mahogany shim (measuring 1/8" thick x 1 15/32" wide x 4 1/4" long), and sanded it to a minus 2-degree pitch. Then I glued it to the bottom surface of the extended neck tenon using #20 medium Super Glue. I chose Super Glue as the adhesive because the mahogany shim is a permanent addition.

I refer to the section of the fretboard that protrudes out from the side of the mahogany neck tenon as “wings.” My next step was to make support shims to fit between the gluing surface of the fretboard wings and the maple top. I cut and sanded two maple shims (1/16" thick x 3/8" wide x 3 1/8" long) with a 2-degree taper to tuck between the underside of the fretboard and top, and then used Super Glue to attach them to the underside of the fretboard.

To ensure that this stage of the restoration was complete, I used a .002" precision feeler gauge to check that there was a tight seal between the neck and body while under clamping pressure. I didn’t want any open space.

Next month, I’ll show you how I blended in the maple shims and upper surface tenon lip by airbrushing gold to match the top. We’ll also cover what was involved when I finally glued the neck and body together.

If you’re coming to the 2011 Winter NAMM show (held January 13-16 in Anaheim, California), please come say hello to us at booth #3383 in Hall D. This will be a good opportunity to talk shop and answer your Restoring an Original questions. Hope to see you there!

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Guitars from Agadez Vol. 3 is essentially a field recording of a band making supremely intense, imaginative, and original guitar music in the face of no-joke, real-world adversity.

Group Inerane
Guitars From Agadez, Vol. 3

Sublime Frequencies



In many ways, the nomadic Tuaregs of the Sahara remain stubbornly immune to modernity—a small miracle in these days of hyper-connectivity and viral culture. But over the last 30 years or so, the barriers to cultural homogeneity (brought about by geography, politics, and tradition) enabled a unique musical bouillabaisse to brew among the Tuareg—an electric guitar-based mélange of traditional Arab song and the sounds of Hendrix, Dylan, James Brown, and John Lee Hooker gleaned from cassettes carried on foot and camel-back between Saharan trading posts.

A few of these groups—most notably Tuareg guitar pioneers Tinarawen—have reached European and North American listeners, but few offer a Tuareg guitar experience as raw and fiery as Group Inerane. Guitars from Agadez Vol. 3 is essentially a field recording of a band making supremely intense, imaginative, and original guitar music in the face of no-joke, real-world adversity. Before this recording, second guitarist Adi Mohamed was shot and killed in violence related to the political strife in Tuareg lands.

Fellow guitarist Bibi Ahmed and the rest of the band carried on in the wake of the tragedy, and the results are some of the most intense and ecstatic guitar grooves ever committed to record. If you’re a stickler for high fidelity, these are not antiseptic studio recordings. But they are absolutely thrilling for their naked grittiness. Through these heated and hazy trances you can hear the echoes—or is it seeds?—of John Lee Hooker’s swamp grooves, Keith Richards’ stinging open-tuned explorations, and the Velvet Underground’s street-trucking rave ups. It’s white hot and hypnotic, truly electric folk music by some of the most original electric guitar players alive today.

Hybrid picking combines the power and speed of flatpicking with some benefits of a purely fingerstyle approach

Beloved by hot-rod country and rock guitarists alike, hybrid picking combines the power and speed of flatpicking with some benefits of a purely fingerstyle approach, such as being able to weave arpeggios across non-adjacent strings or simultaneously strike chord tones for a piano-like sound. (For details on this versatile technique, see “Hybrid Picking 101” on page 2.) But compared to a four-digit classical or jazz fingerstyle technique, hybrid picking has several limitations. The most obvious is that when playing chords, this pick-plus-two- fingers system lets you attack only three notes at a time.

Most guitarists who use hybrid picking shift between a full-on flatpick and a pick-and-fingers approach on the fly. While this offers a huge timbral palette, it can be tough to balance the big, chimey sound of strummed five- and six-string chords with the thinner tone of plucked three-string chords. One way to beef up the latter is to use special three-note voicings that are spread out across a wider range than the typical triads you might otherwise grab. It’s easy to generate “hybrid-friendly” chords, once you know the process.

We’ll begin by modifying standard root-3rd-5th triads, which always occupy a single octave. To make these triads sound bigger, we simply move the middle note—the 3rd (or in the case of a minor triad, the b3rd)—down or up an octave, while leaving the root and 5th in the same register. In this lesson, we’ll discover what happens when we drop the 3rd an octave lower. Next time around, we’ll focus on raising the 3rd one octave higher. Either way, the resulting open triads span more than an octave.

Download Example Audio 1...


Fig. 1 illustrates the process, beginning with a root-3rd-5th A triad in the 5th position. First, strum A on strings 4, 3, and 2 as written. Next, using hybrid picking, pluck the A/C#—the second chord in our example. Musically, only one thing has changed: We’ve dropped the middle note, our 3 (C#), down an octave. But to fret this new chord, we’ve had to refinger the voicing. In this instance, the root migrates from the 4th to the 3rd string. Though the root has moved, its pitch hasn’t changed.

Incidentally, when a chord’s lowest note is not the root, the harmony is typically written as a slash chord with the chord name on the left and the special bass note on the right. Most slash chords have the 3rd (or b3rd) in the bass, but the 5th and other chord tones can show up here too. (You can even have nonchord tones in the bass, but that’s a topic for another column.)

Now, repeat the process for the second pair of chords in this example, Am and Am/C. Here, we’re pulling the b3rd (C) from inside Am and dropping it down an octave. As you play both chords, listen carefully and compare their relative sonic “weight.” With its expanded range, Am/C sounds bigger than its more compact sibling, although without the root as the lowest note, it can also sound more ambiguous. It’s good to keep these qualities in mind when arranging music with slash chords.

Pushing on, we tackle E and Em, pulling out G# and G (the 3rd and b3rd, respectively) and dropping them an octave to create E/G# and Em/G voicings.

Fig. 2 gives us an alternative visual perspective on the four new voicings we’ve created. We can clearly see that the only difference between A/C# and Am/C, or E/G# and Em/G is the half-step shift that results from moving the 3rd to the b3rd. Perhaps you’ve played these chords before. If not, take a minute to chase them up and down the fretboard, and then hop back and forth between the grips on string sets 5–3–2 and 6–4–3.

Download Example Audio 2...

Now, let’s put our chords to work. Fig. 3 contains strummed four- and five-note chords (A2, D2, and the Aadd2 at the end), as well as plucked three-note voicings. Pay attention to the picking-hand markings for A/C#, D/F#, and G2. In bar 3, we get a piano-like effect by simultaneously plucking the notes in G2 and D/F#. It’s a sound you can’t get using a flatpick alone. As you play through this example, notice the variety of picking-hand textures: full strums, arpeggios, and piano stabs. Also, in bars 1 and 2, notice how the lowest note in each slash chord lies a half-step below the root of the subsequent chord and how strongly one leads to the other.

Download Example Audio 3...


Fig. 4 consists entirely of hybrid-friendly slash chords voiced on strings 6, 4, and 3. To accentuate the root in any of these chords, simply yank the 4th string a little harder—that will do the trick. Try this progression with some slow flanging or modulated delay.

Download Example Audio 4...


In this lesson, we’ve created new voicings by dropping the middle note of a root-3rd-5th triad down an octave. Next month, we’ll see what happens when we push the middle note up an octave. Meanwhile, use these chords to create some progressions of your own.

Hybrid Picking 101
A marriage of fingerpicking and flatpicking, hybrid picking offers elements of both techniques, but replaces neither. Photo 1 shows the basic hybrid picking hand position, which involves attacking the strings using a flatpick plus middle and ring fingers. Here, my pick is hitting the 5th string, and my middle and ring fingers are plucking the 3rd and 2nd strings.


With a classical or jazz fingerstyle technique, your wrist is arched, your hand is open, and your picking fingers are relaxed and extended. With hybrid picking, however, your wrist is flat, your hand rides low, and your middle and ring fingers are tightly curled as they engage the strings. It’s the flatpick that determines this close-in hand position. Curled like this, your picking fingers pull up on the strings, rather than stroking across them (as they would in more traditional fingerpicking). This pulling creates a snappy, popping tone that’s at the heart of country, rockabilly, and other twangy styles.

For a percussive effect, use the back edge of your picking hand to mute the bass strings as you flatpick them (Photo 2). Palm-muting also helps you prevent unwanted open strings from ringing out as you dig into the notes you’re aiming for. When muting, rest your hand lightly on the bridge, so you’ll be able to scoot quickly and easily along the saddles as your lines move from bass to treble strings and back again. Two more benefits: A light touch is better for your tendons and allows your guitar to resonate more freely for maximum sustain.

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