Dead frets, beats and the RPM Challenge
January 26th, 2009
Things are looking up for this year’s RPM Challenge. I’ve completed my guitar repairs (scratch that off the to-do list), though they didn’t go quite like I’d hoped. Back in 2007, I purchased a Line 6 Variax electric guitar because I was intrigued by the instrument’s capabilities. Of course I could only afford the low-end model, and the low-end model comes with an equivalent neck. I loved the guitar’s electronics, but hated the feel of the neck. Never shying away from an opportunity to destroy two perfectly good guitars, I removed the neck from my old Fender Telecaster (loved that neck!) and made some DIY modifications that allowed me to swap out the stock Variax neck for the Tele neck. I learned later that this isn’t really an advisable move, as the Telecaster has a different body design than the Variax. But, I had already made the switch and things seemed to be going OK. And then I started getting dead frets on the guitar’s low-E string. I made some adjustments to try and fix the problem, but nothing worked. I did some research online and found a great video tutorial on how to do electric guitar setups. I was particularly interested in the video about fret filing, as I believed that’d be the solution to the dead fret problem. It looked easy enough! I ordered some special fret files from Stewart MacDonald and picked up a few other things from a local hardware store. Once I had everything together, I began filing down the frets, and it seemed like I was making progress. The initial dead fret problem was clearing up. But then, other frets started to go and no matter how much I filed, I couldn’t get them to sound properly. Figuring that I had probably hit overkill with the filing, I decided to give in, and swapped the Tele neck out for the original Line 6 neck.
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Line 6 Variax with modified Telecaster neck, on the operating table.
