What tuners? And what guitar? 2 questions

Reckless Abandon

Reckless Abandon

New member
I have two guitars that stay in tune about 5 minutes each time they are tuned. One is a Tele knockoff the other is an epiphone les Paul special I got in 1997 with GFS Liverpool (gretch) pickups.

Which one needs new tuners? Do I need locking tuners? Thanks
 
Re: What tuners? And what guitar? 2 questions

Fine tune and lube the nut first. If that doesn't help you may indeed need new tuners. I like Planet Waves locking tuners with auto wire trimming.
 
Re: What tuners? And what guitar? 2 questions

could be many things, it could be the nut, tuners like you said or the way you play, I see you have an EVH painted guitar in your pic so if your bending the neck well.... I would start small and work my way up. check your nut ;)
 
This may sound odd; I've Changed pickups, re wired guitars, wired from scratch, etc for 10 years but never messed with my nuts lol. What am I looking for? I sound like a noob :)
 
Re: What tuners? And what guitar? 2 questions

binding or pinching, If your tuning and your hear "plink" then its binding/pinching. get a graphite from a pencil and rub it in the nut
 
Heard it on 1 string on the Epi. I must suck. Maybe I didn't hear it at all. The Tele nothing. Both are cheap guitars. They are for when I want to "Jangle" a little.
 
Re: What tuners? And what guitar? 2 questions

Sometimes it's enough just to take some very fine sandpaper and run it lightly through your nut slots to remove any possible burrs or sharp edges and then lube them. The reality of it is that the only way tuners can allow a guitar to go out of tune is for their gears to move and string tension does not move the gears on a machine head even on a cheap set so you can talk about locking tuners and locking nuts all day long but in the end they offer no solution since tuners simply don't slip in the first place. It always cracks me up when I hear guitar players who bend their "b" string up a step and a half or dive bomb their wammy bar and wonder why they went out of tune. Bending tends to stretch strings out of tune and there isn't much you can do to prevent that. If doing those things are included in your playing style the real answer is to get yourself a good pedal tuner and get accustomed to using it frequently.
 
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Re: What tuners? And what guitar? 2 questions

Here's a common misconception about locking tuners. They don't actually LOCK the pitch of the string in place. All they do is lock the string into the post which means you don't need to wrap any string around the post. It really just makes string changes WAY easier and faster.
 
Then something is wrong with my nut. I'm serious I cannot play a song with those 2 guitars without it going out of tune. My other guitars do not do that including my Wolfgang and wolf copy
 
Re: What tuners? And what guitar? 2 questions

Famous lutheir Dan Erlewine says that the majority of 'tuner problems' are really issues with the nut slots. When you have tuning problems, the tuners are not the first place to look.

Once I started putting graphite powder (the kind used on padlocks) on my nut slots, almost all of my tuning problems disappeared (and I bend like a madman). Far too often guys rush out and buy new tuners. Yes, it is possible to have crappy tuners, but it's not a common problem.
 
Re: What tuners? And what guitar? 2 questions

You've never messed with your nuts? Then you don't know what you are missing, man!!!
 
Re: What tuners? And what guitar? 2 questions

When you play them, do the strings come up more and more flat as you go? If it's getting flatter, you might just need to make sure the strings are stretched in tightly. If you've got slack at the posts, then when you bend you pull a bit more string off of the post, and it goes flat. When they're stretched in tight, that won't happen nearly as much.
 
Re: What tuners? And what guitar? 2 questions

+1 to everyone about nuts in general, but another +1 on the GraphTech nuts. The difference is significant.

While locking tuners aren't necessarily the golden ticket, I've found they do help. But, first get the nut fixed.

I got a set of locking tuners installed on my Squier Teles - they already had GraphTech nuts - and the amount of abuse they'll take without going out of tune surprises me still. I love to bend and really abuse the low E a lot, sometimes on purpose just to see if it'll go out of tune. Maybe I need to tweak a couple of percent after I do that. I went a whole band practice (about 2 hours) without having to adjust anything the whole time. I checked after the first and second song, then just forgot the rest of the time.

Part of that, I'm sure, is a proper setup. Once the nut's good, you need to balance the string/neck tension. I'm ok at this, but a good tech will get it right.
 
I used big bends nut sauce and pencil lead on the Tele knockoff. Stayed in tune better playing it for 20 minutes. Still slipped a little. will work on the epiphone in a bit.

Thanks guys
 
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