My Light Diagram

I recently mentioned to a friend of mine that I was thinking of making a new nut for my acoustic guitar, and he generously donated a couple of nut blanks. One is ebony and the other is Corian. I will use the ebony one to make the new standard nut (which will no doubt be covered in a future blog entry), but decided to make a raised nut with the Corian for when I want to play slide guitar. Corian, incidentally, is a material that is most commonly used on the surfaces of kitchen units, but has also been used by both Gibson and Martin to make nuts. It is not the best material, tonally-speaking (though it’s hardly crap), but it is easy to work with. More info about Corian can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corian One of the bonuses of a raised nut for playing slide guitar is that it will be flat, rather than radiused, so no need to work out exact curvature, etc., and since it will be raised off the fretboard, there is no need to worry about precise height measurements. That cou...

Yeah, that’s right, “nut lubricant” (sometimes known as nut sauce). Get all your giggling out of the way before we continue. So you know how sometimes you’re tuning up your guitar and you hear this pinging noise and the string suddenly “jumps” up in pitch? That’s caused by the string getting stuck (sometimes known as "binding") in the nut slots. You can also encounter it when using a tremolo. My usual fix for this is to widen the nut slots slightly using nut files. However, today I’m going to show you another solution that can often work instead. We’re going to make a lubricant to put in the nut slots. This is especially useful for tremolo-equipped guitars. Here's our patient for today. It's a late 80's Fernandes "Limited Edition" Strat. Beautiful guitar, but a terrible case of "pinging" at the nut. We don’t need much for this, just some graphite (courtesy of a pencil lead) and something to hold the powder together (petroleum jelly). Some sandp...