String binding
KeithHandy posted in Instruments on May 10th, 2008
After a quick Googling of “keep guitar in tune”, it seems like there are too many incomplete answers out there, so I’d like to address a specific case of the problem that I’ve put up with for years.
If the guitar’s intonation is basically decent overall, and the strings have already been stretched, but a.) strings shift flat immediately after bending, and b.) strings shift sharp immediately after pushing down the tremolo bar, this is a problem called “string binding”. It means there’s just enough friction in the grooves of the nut to prevent the tension from completely evening out on either side of it. When you bend, a tiny bit of string slides away from the headstock towards the body and “sticks” there. The reverse is true for a whammy dive. It’s not subtle; in fact, it can make the guitar outright unplayable unless you just strum chords and stop trying to play rock star.
For those of us who want to play rock star, Sound On Sound has a great little paragraph tucked away in an obscure article from a zillion years ago. Scroll down to “NON-STICK GUITAR NUT”. Key points: 1.) It’s not supposed to stick. (I actually wasn’t sure if it was supposed to “not stick” or “stick better”, but the former seems more logical, since we do actually have to turn the tuning pegs now and then.) 2.) People with graphite nuts are lucky. And last but not least, 3.) you can lubricate your nut — on your guitar, gutterbrain — by “placing a single layer of plumber’s PTFE tape over the nut before you fit your next set of strings”.
(You can of course trim the tape if you’re vain and superficial.)
To all the people out there who list “strings being too old” as a cause of bad intonation, what universe are you living in? Strings may lose a lot of their timbral majesty when they get old, but in my experience they don’t become harder to keep in tune. Maybe it’s harder to hear if they’re in tune or not because they have such a dull sound?
