Do I need to adjust the action on my Strat?

[Rick Lee]

If you were local, I'd walk you through it. Never be afraid to adjust the truss rod. Just be sure you have good eyes and can see if the neck is straight or not. There are three variables here - truss rod, string action and intonation.

I'd start by tuning the guitar up to standard E, so you have the right tension on the strings when you then adjust the truss rod. Also, do you keep your bridge flat or floating? If you float it (unlikely), this will be a real PITA. If flat (when you hit a note and push on the end of the bridge, you should hear no change in pitch), then you next want to adjust the action. Tune up again after you adjust the truss and before going to the action. This is a matter of personal preference, style of music and string gauge. I use .010's on all my guitars because they give you more sound and make your hands strong, which means you can really show off on other people's guitars, since most of them use .009's.

To adjust the action, you use a tiny allen wrench to move the saddles for each string up or down. Each saddle on your Strat has two tiny allen bolts. They don't have to be perfectly the same height. Just get the strings high enough off the fret wire that they don't buzz, but low enough that playing an octave higher doesn't really raise the pitch more than a perfect octave. If you play an open E and then fret it at the 12th fret and it sounds higher than an octave, you should lower the action as much as you can without making the string buzz.

Intonation is very tricky, but getting it right can make your guitar into a whole new instrument. The gist of it is to make the 12th fret wire exactly equidistant from the other two string ends, or at least where they end on the nut and saddle. Each string's thickness can affect this, so you can't do it by sight. You hit an open string and then hit it at the 12th fret open harmonic and then fret it at the 12th fret. All three should sound absolutely identical. If you don't have a tuner for this and your hearing is bad (like mine), you can put your left ear against one horn of the guitar and you should hear it loud and clear. If holding the string down at the 12th fret is at all higher than a perfect octave above the open string sound, then you need to loosen the intonation, which you do with a small philips head and it's the tiny screw at the very end of the bridge. You loosen that. If it's too low, you need to tighten it. Keep tuning after each step. When you get this perfect, you should be able to hold a chord and have each note and interval sound perfect. Then you should be able to play it an octave higher and still have perfect intervals. If you have no ear at all, then you probably won't notice bad intonation. But if you hear such things, anything less than perfect intonation will drive you crazy.