We, at All Strings Nylon, see this everyday…

A customer driving for hours because they had a telephone conversation with Chuck Marfione (luthier and owner of All Strings Nylon)…

They then grab their guitar (or, in this case, guitars) and jump in their cars for the multi-hour jaunt to the ASN workshop in North Carolina…

Guitarist Gordon Kreplin of Ascencion Music Studios in Kill Devil Hills, NC interviews Chuck Marfione after Chuck performs a custom setup of a luthier-made guitar (a Lateral Diamond Millenium by Darren Hippner).

You can watch the video below followed by the full transcript…

GK: Hi, we’re here with Chuck Marfione in his wonderful shop and I drove over 6 hours to see him. And, brought a beautiful Darren Hippner instrument that was very hard to play and, wow, Chuck you’ve done an amazing job setting this up… I had no idea that this instrument could play the way it does…

Can you tell me a little bit about what you did?

CM: Sure, Gordon… Well, setting up a guitar is really about evaluating a number of different elements; and, that is: the nut, the saddle, the frets, the relief in the fretboard itself, the strings… All of these things are playing together here…

So, what I did is…

• The first thing that I did was evaluated just the frets themselves to see if we had any un-level frets using this little tool called the fret rocker…
• I also then used a straightedge to (which is over here, let me go get it)… To evaluate and see if we had any relief to work with on this… And, this relief is extremely important—and, we can go into that a bit later if we need to…
• And, then, of course, evaluating the height of the strings above the fretboard at the nut…
• And, the height of the strings also here at the 12th fret…
• And, taking into consideration the height of the strings above the soundboard itself…

But, actually the work is pretty much just taking and reworking the nut perhaps. In this case, we created a new nut…

GK: We cut a new nut…

CM: Yeah, we cut a new nut on this one…
And, evaluating the saddle here for height and making a determination of how much of the saddle we need to shave off sin order to get the string height down… Especially here at the 12th fret… This is kind of like the fulcrum or centerpoint … And, getting it down to a point where, overall, the playability of this guitar across the whole neck is much more comfortable…

So, again… Making a new nut, lowering the saddle, taking and polishing or leveling any frets that are high… And, in this case, also putting a little bit of relief in here by shaving some of these frets so that we have a little bit of just, let’s say, headroom here… So, that when we’re playing a note, we’re not getting any buzz on these frets going up here [points to the 4th–12th frets]…

GK: I was amazed to learn how much goes into the inner fit of the bridge and the nut and the frets… And, that all of this together, really, as you did this, created a better sound for the guitar… I mean, the guitar, to me, sounds about 20% better than it did… It’s very even… the basses came out, they’re very punchy… And, it’s like I got another guitar…

CM: Well, again, it’s because you have all of these elements playing together…
Any one of these, by themselves, can, obviously, have an impact… When you now start taking all of these elements and start putting them together…
You know, if you compromise here [points to the nut]…
You know, if you compromise here [points to the saddle]…
Compromise on the frets…
Compromise on the strings…
Compromise on the height…
Essentially what you’re gonna do is a compromised playability…

GK: The thing that I’m most impressed by is your wealth of knowledge that you have about this… You’ve worked with some other builders and studied some other things… you said something about learning some things from Kenny Hill… And, his instruments are so incredibly well playable…

CM: Well… I think that essentially from Kenny is the statement that really stands out is that he builds his guitar from the strings down… And, that’s a quote from him…
And, you really have to think about setting a guitar up from the strings down as well…
And, again, it’s just about evaluating all of these different elements…
You know, some of it comes from experience… Some of it is trial and error…
And, you work it… A little bit at a time…
We’ve been able to do a great job and I’m really pleased at the way this came out and I’m more than pleased that my client is pleased with it…

GK: Oh, I can’t wait to get my hands on that… and, now we’re gonna do a few other guitars that I brought you…

CM: Yeah, well we now have 4 more Hippners to work on…

GK: Well, great, Chuck, thank you… This has really been exciting… I live on the East Coast here and I thought that I was gonna have to ship these off to somebody on the West Coast… but, I think that I found somebody just as qualified…

CM: You’re always welcome…

GK: Thank you…