![]() ![]() Therefore, to make the guitar play and sound the best it possibly can, you’ll need to have leveled frets, and have a healthy balance between natural fret buzz and low action. This is often in conjunction with uneven frets, and is a problem that plagues almost all lower end guitars. There’s a certain point at which the buzz is so strong it overpowers the vibration of the string, causing dead notes. This doesn’t mean that it won’t be audible at all if the buzz is too strong. Luckily, if the fret buzz is mild enough, it won’t translate through the pickups, meaning you’ll only hear it acoustically, but not amplified. This usually occurs in the higher frets, where the length of the string is very short as there’s less space for the string to vibrate. Unless your strings are so high off the fretboard that you can stick another guitar in between, you’ll always have fret buzz in some way. ![]() Unfortunately, this is something that plagues all electric guitars one way or another. This is what we call ‘ fret-buzz’ (not to be confused with string noise from playing). Getting the action too low means the strings are too close to the frets, which means a string can touch the frets too much while vibrating, causing a nasty buzzing sound. And when there’s more space for the string to move, the more rotations it gets, which increases note clarity and sustain. A string doesn’t just vibrate, it rotates along its own axis between the bridge and the nut (kind of like the way a skip rope works). Which seems strange at first, but if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Generally, higher action will sound better. Lower action makes it easier to play faster passages, and makes things like hammer-ons and slides easier to play. High action means that your fingers have to push the string down a greater distance for it to touch the fret and create a note. There are conceivably exceptions to this, but we’re going to keep it relatively simple. A larger distance between the frets and the strings generally means a guitar is harder to play. This is part of what makes a guitar play the way it does.
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