Official Luthiers Forum!

Hi

Little help please

Just doing my initial setup on my dreadnought and all is good apart from one thing

I have a sitar sound on open high e string

No buzzing at all when fretted

I have about .125mm clearance between the first fret and string when i press down on 3rd fret .. which according to book i have (kinkeade) is fine

neck seems to be set ok and frets are all level

Any help would be great

Cheers

Nut slot!

Sounds like the slot is slightly sloped the wrong way. The highest point in the slot should be the edge against the fingerboard. Take your nut file and make sure the slot is angled to be more parallel to the headstock, but not quite.

Hope that helps...

First thing I'd check is the nut slot -- make sure it's perfectly flat ( no crown ) and it's angled back toward the head stock.

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Ken Cierp

http://www.kennethmichaelguitars.com/

Yup!

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

Yup that's a nut slot. What's happening CP is that the nut slot back angle is too shallow so the vibrating wave of the string broaches the nut slot face and travels into the slot. This makes the "speaking length" of the string, the part that we hear, constantly variable in length resulting in that old Ravi Shankar sound.

The remedy is to recut the slot and you have plenty of height to do that. The angle that the nut slots are cut at should be something like half the head stock set-back angle (attribution to Frank Ford). So if your ax has say a 14 degree set back angle cut your slots to around 7 degrees.

One other common cause is a hump in the nut slot where the slot is not flat but very shallow on the nut face, then humped and then more radical in angle toward the back of the nut. Solution: recut the nut slot.

When recutting the slots you don't want to go too deep or it will ruin the nut so a safe way to improve the angles on the slots is to mark the bottom of the high e nut slot near the face and then when filing try not to remove the mark that you made near the nut face instead concentrating on keeping the file at half the set back angle of the head stock.

Nut slot cutting is an art.... but it does get easier and more understandable the more you do it, big time.

How's she sounding and congrats too - this is the exciting part when she starts to sing for the fist time!

Thanks for all the input guys... all done..sitar sound gone ...u guys know your stuff ..i know im biased but sounds really good..did go to my local guitar shop yesterday and tried out some £500 dreads and mine competes (bit better i think) got a nice boom from the base and a bright treble ..lovelly might be brave and post some pics of it later..

Congrats CP!!! That was my experience with my first too, it sounded pretty good although my first looked bad enough that even the garbage men didn't want it.... true story.... What do they know anyway.....(kidding of course)

So now you are likely hopelessly hooked on Lutherie with likely visions of your next and the next after that in your mind. Very cool and again congrats to you CP!

Thanks hesh ..your right next one is in planning stage lol

Thanks for yours and everyones help this forum is a goldmine
will post some photos in a bit

In this instance the nut was the problem but this can also happen at the other end also. Just putting that in so that someone with the problem will look at both the nut and saddle.
Tom

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A person who has never made a mistake has never made anything!!!

Not so likely maybe when fretted notes are not buzzing I would have thought.

I might mention also I had to trace one weird buzz, various notes on different strings (far eastern build)
That turned out to be a thin 3/4" long shim, stuck under one end of the flat bottomed saddle...

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

I recently had this problem with the saddle being too flat. It surprised me in that it hissed on the open e as well as a couple of frets, like maybe the 5th and 6th. Saddle fixed it.

Yup, it can happen at the other end too with either too flat a saddle top or, and this is more in the repair world, over time the strings wear grooves in the saddle crown. It's most prominent with the high e and b because of the narrower string. These grooves can create a "pinch" of sorts that for lack of a better term... pinches off the free vibration of the string and produces a muted note. Any string will wear a saddle groove it's just that the degraded tone of a grooved saddle seems to be noticeable with the high strings.

Solution file the grooves out of the saddle and recrown. I see a lot of this pinch thing in my world since we work on instruments that have been singing for a while. By the way for non compensated saddles the SM fret crowing files have a dual use here too in crowning saddles if you are not into free hand filing. Also by the way I personally love using files to shape saddles and nuts, it's one of the most relaxing things that I do and really enjoy as well. Makes me have a bit of understanding for the attraction to scrimshaw back in the day.

I think that the flat saddle thing is less common than a nut slot that is too shallow mostly because most of us can see a saddle crown pretty well, seeing inside a nut slot is not as easy AND if you struggle with nut slots, welcome to the human race.... I struggled with filing nut slots too shallow too until I had done enough of them that it's a no brainer now.

Remembering back to my first sitar sound on likely my first guitar... it amazed me that my perception was that the problem was in the bridge area because that's where I heard it from. The idea that it was and is a nut slot seemed very counter to what I wanted to believe.