Acoustic guitar nut replacement and what you should know

We feel that an acoustic guitar nut made from bone is the best for your tone. Over time you may notice your guitar strings buzzing on open notes. This open string buzz is usually caused by nut slots that have worn down from playing and tuning your guitar up and down. The guitar strings are touching the first fret and they shouldn’t be! This can be quite annoying when your trying to play your acoustic guitar in any situation.

There is however a solution. It’s time to have your acoustic guitar nut replaced by a professional. We will often fabricate nuts made from bone. We start from a bone blank and fabricate the nut to fit your acoustic guitar the way that it should. A lot of guitar manufacturers will use synthetic materials for acoustic guitar nuts to cut down on costs however we believe an acoustic guitar nut fabricated from bone will bring new life into your acoustic guitar, our customers like them and so will you. 

Customers will at times ask us to install a prefabricated acoustic guitar nut that they bought online. Unfortunately most of the time these nuts do not fit properly. Either the string spacing is uneven or they are not the right size.

We know how frustrating this can be, we are here to guide you.

A lot of us grew up with music in our family’s. Guitars being played by family members especially on Holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving when all would gather and sing songs passed down from generations past, aunts, uncles, fathers and grandfathers joining in chorus. Old martin Guitars, gibson, Ovation’s and many other instruments would be pulled from a guitar case new and old to regale us with these songs. It was common to see maybell, silvertone & Harmony Guitars as these were the more affordable Guitars to own and readily available from the Sears catalog. These old guitars no matter what the brand have a very special place for us in our hearts as they preserve the great memories of days past. As our loved ones leave this world to another. Often these great treasures are left behind in a closet, under a bed or in the care of grandchildren, some of them are in great condition and others are in need of attention while cracks have formed or neck angles have dove into the abyss leaving these guitars with extremely high uncomfortable action making with the end result being that we don’t want to play them. The Maybell parlor guitar pictured in this post is one of these special guitars that is priceless to the family. It came to us with all of the back bracing completely popped off and the neck block came loose causing the top to crack on each side of the fretboard thus causing the sound hole to cave in. We were able to re install all of the back bracing and repair the loose neck block. The back was then reinstalled after fixing some more racing that we found to be loose on the top. After this a neck reset was performed to get the playability of this guitar dialed in.

Once all the repair work was completed the customer arrived to claim Grandpas old 1930’s Maybell Parlor guitar and was very pleased. It was important to us to retain as much of the patina as possible in this old guitar so we left the dark build up on the top. It just figures that the owner of this guitar would show up in a cool old New Yorker!

Here are some pics of the restoration process.