Fretting Out

On my workhorse guitar, a 1994 Mexican Stratocaster, I would fret out after the 19th fret, essentially making it a 20 fret guitar.  I don't often play that high, but the times I would, it would be embarrassing always being flat trying to get that C# or even the high C sometimes. 

It started when I replaced the neck on my skinny fret 1994 Squier Series guitar with a 2008 neck I bought on Ebay.  I don't really know what I'm doing when I am making any of these mods to my guitars, but I like the pursuit of tinkering.  Anyway, I unbolted the old neck and slapped on the new one. The frets felt immediately better, and I loved the look, sound, and feel of the maple fret board (the old one was rosewood).  But somewhere down the line, it started fretting out on the high fret on the high E string only.

I tried all sorts of things, including raising the action of just the E string, but it felt weird and I lost a noticeable amount of volume.  I read that my hero, Jeff Beck, had his trem set pretty high so he could get his trademark flutter sound up and down in pitch.  When I did that, my guitar no longer fretted out.  Problem solved.

Well, for a while. 

With Beck's set up, I perceived a loss of sustain and richness in the sound (though Jeff does not share this problem with me).  The action also felt weird.  I started thinking of buying another guitar just to get around this, but my attachment to this guitar, and my attachment to a pile of money stopped me from doing that.  I lowered the action, I lowered the trem, and mostly, I lowered my expectations of ever playing on the high frets on this guitar.

Then, last week, looking for something else, I came across on a newsgroup someone who had a similar fretting out problem.  He took it to his tech who diagnosed that the culprit was an unseated fret.  The tech took out his fret block and his custom hammer and gently tapped the fret back into place.

Inspired, I took the guitar to my tech (me), who took out his fret block (a chunk of wood that fell off the cabinet he made) and his custom hammer (a rock - God knows why this was lying on the floor of the den), and smacked the fret into place with a couple of whacks.  Ooops, there was now a groove in the fret.  My tech draped a rag over the pickups so no filings would stick to the magnets, and gave the fret a polish with some steel wool.

And waddaya know? No fretting out!  The C# sounds like it should and I can also bend up to D.


(Okay, there is a small chance that it was the steel wool, not the fret tapping that cured this problem, but without a time machine, I'll never know.  But who cares?  I can play high C#!)