Hi all, I just bought a Yamaha GL-1 guitalele and I love it! Unfortuneately there is some nasty string buzz going on and I am at a total loss with what I need to do here. Would replacing the stock strings help? The only strings that buzz are the 6th and 5th strings, but they don't buzz when played open. Do I need to raise the nut and/or the saddle? Do I need to deepen the nut grooves?
Thanks in advance,
Take care!
If the strings dont buzz when played open, then the nut is not involved in the problem since it occurs only when the string is fretted.
I too have a GL-1, but have not had this problem you described. However on my instrument the saddle is ramped, as in taller on the bass strings and lower on the treble strings, this is typical of classical-guitar type instruments.
As theabsurdman has said you could try raising the saddle, either entirely or just on the bass side. You could do a simple test that costs basically nothing but your time and create a shim from 1/8" (3.5mm) or 3/32" (2.5mm) strips [depending upon the saddle width - dont have my GL-1 handy to check) cut from a business card, which has a length that is really close to the width of the saddle.
The idea is that you could add one strip at a time, retune and see if that fixes the problem, and if one strip is not enough, detune the strings, take out the saddle and add another strip. tune it up and see what happens, and then rinse and repeat until the buzz goes away.
The consequence is that this will raise your string height and action slightly, which may effect your intonation (and that would beg the question of compensating the saddle).
Another thing to consider like theabsurdman said is that if you have raised frets, even just on the bass side, this can be fixed either by filing and recrowing the offending frets, or by gently tapping them down with a rubber mallet. If you are not comfortable with this kind of project, you may want to take the GL-1 to a luthier or guitar tech and have them look at it.
Worst case scenario is that the neck could be torqued or warped in such a way that the buzzing only occurs on the bass string, and if this is the case, without a truss rod, there is little you can do, if anything to fix it. If the instrument is new and came like this, I'd consider it defective and send it back for another.
One way to eyeball the problem and see if the neck is torqued or if the frets are uneven, is with the strings tuned to pitch, hold the butt end of the uke right up to your cheek (like you are aiming a rifle), and close one eye and sight down the
string line from the saddle to the nut, this will be a perfectly straight line due to the string tension, and then you can examine the relative height of each fret with regard to the perfect line of the string. The fattest and thinnest [outside] strings will be easy to see any problems, but the middle four strings may be a little more difficult to see.
Aside from that, you can take either a string height guage, or ruler with 1mm increment markings, and from the players position, find the buzzing fret, and measure the string height across all wound strings, at that exact position of the bad fret, they will not always be exactly the same but if they are more than 1mm difference between the 6th, 5th, and 4th strings, you can see right where the problem is.
Another thing to try, is a lighter guage set of strings, as this will have thinner strings on the bass side as well, and they should have better clearance over the frets both when fretted and during the vibrating arc of the string when played. I use the Thomastik-Infeld CF128 set on my GL-1, which has chrome flatwound strings [almost no finger squeak noise] and includes a wound third string.
These strings are the following guages:
.027, .031, .027, .030, .035, .045
and I have it tuned ADGCEA and like the sound and feel very much. be advised that these strings are not cheap at ~$20 per set, but they are the ONLY chrome flatwound classical strings I have found, and other 'polished' or 'smoothwound' strings are like playing against a concrete surface, whereas these Thomastik CF128 are as close as you are going to get to the feel of a nylon-type surface found on your treble strings, but in a wound string.
While I am not a luthier, nor a guitar tech, I have learned a lot from this forum, as well as my own research elsewhere, and I try to use common sense to try and troubleshoot things. Sometimes you really dont need fancy tools to diagnose a problem, but sometimes you do need some kind of tools to fix the problem.
Hope this helps. Please report back and let us know so we can offer more options if possible.
-Booli
