MAXIMIZE YOUR GUITAR!
by Kenny Marshall



.:Part One:.

    Welcome to AL&M's guitar shop! Hi, my name is Kenny Marshall and you can find our shop in the back right-hand corner of the store, right underneath the picture of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Robert Cray, and Eric Clapton. We specialize in making your guitar play as well as it possibly can! Of course, that means making your guitar to play like you want it to play. After 29 years of experience in guitar repair (21 of full-time building and repair!), I leave nothing to chance, but apply the laws of physics and common sense to help me understand what will work best for you!

    The basic starting place of getting the most out of your instrument for the least ammount of money, is what I call the "Complete Set-up". This process involves cleaning and oiling the fingerboard, restringing, and a comprehensive series of adjustments that balance together to achieve the best to achieve the best playability for you. Yes, that's every action adjustment that can be made, including calibrating the pick-ups and the icing on the cake - setting the intonation on my extrememly accurate digital readout tuner. My tuner can easily tell the difference between a warm and cool tuning fork! I've had the thrill of meeting many of the world's greatest guitarists and the challenge of meeting their expectations of guitar playability. I look forward to meeting you and making your guitar play the best it can!

-THE FRET DOCTOR



.:Part Two:.

    In this section, I want to challenge you to see if you think you have your guitar playing as good as you would like. If not, why not?

    In the old days a perspective buyer would search and search through racks of guitars in stores within driving distance,just to find the one guitar that had the "magic". They actually had only found a guitar that had inadvertently been shipped from the factory with the "set-up" pretty much dialed in. As a rule, most factories really don't spend any extra time actually fine-tuning the action adjustments. In fact, the clostest they come is maybe a "factory specification" set up, which has the action high enough to not show up at the music store buzzing...but not low enough to please most players. Some music stores promise to offer free set-up work for the lifetime of the guitar. If they are offering to maintain "factory specs" on the instrument, that's no bargain! to achieve personalized action adjustment that is suited to your taste and your style - you need to have your guitar professionally set up. We offer the service at the Fret Doctor's shop here at AL&M. My most common procedure is the "complete set-up" which involves every major adjustment that can be made to your instrument (action, intonation, nect, etc...). So grab your guitar and bring it down to the shop. I'll personally give you a free professional evaluation of your guitar's playability. See you soon!

-THE FRET DOCTOR



.:Part Three:.

    The guitar building industry is a tough business to survive in. I had the privelege of working as production manager of Zion Guitars from 1982-1989. We knew that we couldn't compete by building guitars that were inexpensive as many that were available, but we knew that we could build guitars that played better than any others! The way we achieved this was by spending the extra time on each instrument, giving it a complete set up. There was however a secret that made it possible to get 100% out of the complete set up effort! The secret was to hand dress the frets on each guitar neck prior to setting the guitar action. I can't emphasize enough how much difference this makes. It makes your guitar feel more comfortable than pre-washed denims, an overstuffed leather chair or your favorite slippers! You get the picture. Some refer to this process as a level, crown and polish. These are the three basic steps involved in a fret dressing. After "reading your frets", with a special machine-tooled straight edge, I set your truss rod for the optimum position to then level your fretswith an industrial grade, heavy sharpening stone. The the work really begins by painstakingly (and I do mean PAIN), reshaping each fret with special U-shaped crowning files to restore as much of a nice round shape as possible, and making as many as eight different micro-file cuts on each and every fret. Lastly the frets are finely polished by various grades of sandpaper and steel wool. My guarentee is that your guitar will play better and feel better than it ever has since it rolled off the production line! That is unless it's a Zion guitar!

-THE FRET DOCTOR