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A warped guitar neck can make your guitar notes out of tune in some positions and may even create buzzing or muddy quality in the tone your guitar produces. This may have been caused by heat, humidity, time and the natural pressure exerted on the neck by your strings, or other factors. But for your guitar to sound the way it's intended, you'll need to have its neck straightened. Having this done professionally can cost up to $800, if not more.
This article was co-authored by Staff. Our trained team of editors and researchers validate articles for accuracy and comprehensiveness. 's Content Management Team carefully monitors the work from our editorial staff to ensure that each article is backed by trusted research and meets our high quality standards. This article has been viewed 294, 287 times.
How To Adjust Guitar Truss Rod?
To fix a warped guitar neck, first you'll need to remove the frets from the neck using a hammer and chisel. Then, cut a notch in a block of wood that's just big enough to hold the neck of your guitar. Next, lay your guitar down on a flat surface with the neck resting in the notch you cut, and nail a block of wood over the top of it to apply tension to the neck. Once you've done that, attach the B and A tuning pegs to your tension rods, and adjust them to apply tension to the neck and fix the warping. Finally, use an iron to apply heat and set the new neck shape, and reattach the frets. For more tips, like how to check the alignment of your guitar neck, read on!I kicked off a discussion on warped necks by talking about what a warped neck is not. I suppose, after that, I should really talk about what a warped neck
‘Warped neck’ is too much of a blanket term. At a minimum, it’s too broad and, at most, it’s lost all utility altogether.
So, what I’ll do is take a look at the possible ways in which a guitar or bass neck might ‘warp’. Then, each of those differently types of warp can be discussed.
Is My Neck Warped?
Actually, before we even get to that, let’s start with trying to define the word itself. In this context, ‘warp’ means some unwanted deformation in a neck —whether through bending, twisting, or shearing. This covers a lot of ground so let’s get started.
This is the most common ‘deformation’ of a guitar or bass neck. String tension pulls on the neck and forces it into a bow shape.
Most guitar and bass necks will probably have some small amount of bow in them all the time. That’s actually a good thing — most players’ styles will benefit from just a little up-bow. We call this neck bow ‘relief’.
Guitar Truss Rod Adjustment Guide
Modern instruments generally have the advantage of an adjustable truss rod that allows us to counter-balance the strings’ pull and control the amount of relief in the neck.
Some instruments, mainly vintage examples, may not have an adjustable truss rod and may rely on some other method to provide passive strengthening against string tension. This is typically a rod or beam of stronger material, inlaid in the neck, beneath the fingerboard.
So, we have to mention the heat-treatment option discussed last time. It’s definitely on the menu of possible solutions but it comes with its own caveats. Have a re-read of the last article on heat-treating necks for more context.
Straightening A Neck With Heat
Other potential fixes revolve around fret and fingerboard work. If we can 'level’ the fingerboard and/or frets, we can remove some or all of the bow.
For relatively minor bows, it might be possible to level just the frets and give a straighter plane along their tops. Most of the time we’re considering this sort of repair, however, the bow is too big to deal with only in frets.
Removing the frets and levelling the wood of the fingerboard is the next logical step. This might get you where you need to be (and remember that you might not desire a perfectly straight neck at the end of this process — a little relief is usually just fine). Using something like the Erlewine Neck Jig to hold a guitar neck in a particular position while you level the fingerboard can give great results.
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There are some considerations, of course. You have to be cautious about how much wood you’ll remove from the fingerboard. You don’t want to end up with a fingerboard tapering down to nothing at one end. Fret slots will likely need to be made deeper in places after you’ve levelled and you may have to replace (or remove and reinstall) inlay.
Careful refretting, using fret wire with a selection of wider tangs can be a big help in correcting this sort of up-bow. I’ve talked about this sort of corrective compression refret before and you can check that out for more info. The short version is, wider fret wire tangs forced into narrow fret slots can force the neck back against the up-bow.
Much of the time we’ll end up using a combination of a corrective refret and the levelling techniques above to straighten out a neck.
Fixing A Broken Gibson Truss Rod On A Vintage Grabber
In some cases, we might apply the levelling technique to the neck itself. The fingerboard is removed and the neck is fully or partially levelled. We may follow with some additional levelling on the reattached fingerboard and even some corrective refretting.
The cons of this are that it’s much more work and therefore more expensive. Levelling on the neck can also alter the shape very slightly and require work to ‘blend’ the edge of the fingerboard back in (more on this next time as this is running long). You’ll likely have some finish touch-up required.
One big pro in this operation is that, with access to the ‘internals’ of the neck you can choose to add some reinforcement against re-bowing in the future. Whether that be a stronger truss rod (adjustable or static) or something like carbon fibre beams, you can do a lot to strengthen a neck here.
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It’s definitely worth mentioning that even instruments with adjustable truss rods can sometimes pull into too much relief — more than the truss rod can correct.
While the fixes described above are all valid in these cases too, before setting off down that road, it’s worth trying to ‘help’ the truss rod do its job.
Tighten up the truss rod in order to keep it in this position. You’re helping the truss rod by doing the actual neck bending/correction so that little adjustment nut doesn’t have to do all the work. Once it’s snug, the job of
How To Fix A Back Bow On A Neck
Even in the absence of some clamps and tools, you could have a friend hold an instrument on the edge of a counter while you apply some downward force at the headstock to straighten it somewhat.
By the way, all of this should be performed with slack (or removed) strings —don’t fight things more than you need. And, is it necessary for me to tell you to be careful and take no risks you don’t feel comfortable with? There is a potential to damage your guitar here so I’ll state the obvious: Be careful. Take the guitar to a trusted repairer if you’re not sure about anything.
So, like I said, this is starting to get long. I’ll split out the remaining neck warp issues and discuss them over the next week or two.
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