5 Steps to Setting Up your Bass

Hey Gospel Guitarist here with a quick setup video on how to set up your bass. I did a series of five videos on setting up your guitar but after setting up my bass I just thought hey why don't I just do it all in one shot and do it quick. It's not that much material. You want to lay your bass flat first of all. Make sure nothing is supporting it in this way because you're going to put neck bend into the neck and you're going to measure your neck relief first so you want it hanging over the edge if you need to. Take a capo. It doesn't have to be this kind it could be any kind and put it right on not behind the first fret and clamp that down. This is just a third hand to hold your strings down at the first fret. You want to have your your gauges handy and you're shooting for a starting point of around 15 thousandths so you want to find your 15 thousandths gauge and what you would do is you will hold with your free hand the last fret and then measure at the eighth fret. You want to measure and see what your clearance is here underneath the string to the top of the fret and we're shooting for 15 thousandths. Now my string lifts just a little bit because I have this set at 14 thousandths. 15 after I got everything done was just a little bit high so I just made one little tiny truss rod adjustment and now it plays very comfortable at 14 without buzz. So that's all you need to do. Capo. Hold the last fret. Measure at the eighth fret and we're shooting for the 15 thousandths okay that's 0.015 okay and that's how you will measure your neck relief okay. That's just a starting point. You'll go heavier or lighter on that. Second thing to do remove your capo. You won't be needing your capo anymore and we want to check our string action and so what you're going to do is you're going to measure at the 17th fret the distance between the string and the top of the fret again but this time we're not measuring neck relief we're measuring how high is it over your frets. For bases we want to shoot for 3 30 seconds of an inch and so if you take your fine trusty ruler again I have purchased the cruise tools toolkit which comes with everything you've seen here and more and they're well worth it. It comes with a little tip book on how to set up your guitar and your bass so without touching anything on the guitar you're just going to want to usually it's best to have a flashlight so you want to have a flashlight and so you can read your ruler more accurately and so find your 17th fret and then measure the distance underneath between the fret and the bottom of the string and what you're shooting for there again is 3 30 seconds. Now I've got this Schecter five string custom set down to a 16th of an inch so it's sitting at 2 30 seconds so again I could go a little lower so now you have that set up you want to grab your your gauges again find the 22 thousandths and if you remember my other video or if you've seen my other video you recognize it's the same distance between the top of the first fret and the bottom of your string you're checking to see if you can get a clearance of 22 thousandths here and what you're actually checking isn't this distance but you're checking the nut. Is it cut too deep? You know if you're getting a lot of buzzing on your first second third frets then your nut may be cut too deep so if this is less than 22 thousandths like you measure yours and you're at 20 thousandths well your nut slot might be too deep so you'll want to fill it in or replace the nut and if one of these is cut too deep they're probably you know nowadays everything comes out the factory it's probably one's cut too deep they probably cut the whole thing too deep so but you're measuring for 22 thousandths here and mine is exactly 22 thousandths so again you're checking the nut you're not checking action or neck relief you check those already in the other two procedures that's how you check your nut by ignoring the nut and check the first fret. The next step in setting it up is you're going to do an intonation and the intonation you're going to need whatever size is required for your bridge my bridge has two screws on each string to adjust the saddle up and down and because there's two I want to make sure that they're both adjusted evenly and the saddle is level and I can set up each individual string to match the curvature of the neck as well if you you know I shoot for having my strings toward a feel like when I move from string to string when I'm playing I don't feel like I'm playing a curve because that messes me up I just like the next one to be where I expect it to be you ought to set that up for your own playing but again what you're doing is you're going to sound two notes on your bass and you're going to use a tuner preferably a strobe tuner or needle tuner is preferred and you play two notes you're going to play a fretted note at the 12th string okay and then you're going to play harmonic now they should be identical okay and so using a tuner you're going to make sure these two notes are the same on each fret okay and you're going to move your saddles either forward or backwards using a phillips screwdriver usually on the back of your bridge and it will move your saddle either forward or backwards okay and then once you get the notes the same then your notes above the 12th fret up in the high part of the neck are going to be the same frequency as the notes in the lower registers of your guitar neck so if you find that your bass is playing out of tune the higher up you go and certain strings sound like you're out of tune and you're checking that all the time check your intonation at the 12th fret and make sure that the harmonics and the fretted note is the same frequency using your tuner that's just it that's a real quick setup part of this setup is also pickup height now on bass i don't i have mine set to an eighth of an inch right now on the high and low ends now if that's too bassy for me i just figured i'd set that up as a starting point i usually wind up lowering these down a little bit but i do have an active bass and treble on this guitar so if it's too basic i can just roll off the bass on my control but the pickup will be level so you're just going to shoot for your own playing style here there's really not a hard fast rule for pickup height set them where you want them but again if you get them way way too close just like on a guitar they start pulling the string and you start losing sustain and it can pull it out of tune as well so you don't really want to go you know too close although on a bass you can get a you know pretty close mine's set at an eighth of an inch right now and that's close enough for me you be your own judge for the way you like it and the two there are screws on each side so you can do a little bit of eq'ing of your bass by adding treble by lifting the treble side closer to the string it'll get louder like i said a moment ago if it's too bassy you can lower the bass side i find most of the basses i play they just start getting way too bassy on the low side they just all of a sudden get muddy so i back these off a little bit and then it sounds better to my ear so that's it that's the steps to setting up your bass i hope that's helpful because i know a lot of gospel guitar guys out there guitarists in general play basses too just like i do it's not very hard to transfer your skills as a guitarist to a bass player but i do notice it does help me concentrate more on where the notes are and getting better and better at finding my way around the neck note wise actually knowing where i am on the guitar because i play bass and it's just notes you know you can play chords on the bass too but i'm not that sophisticated yet so anyway that's it for setting up the bass i hope it was worth your time to watch and if it's so please like share and favorite the video and don't forget to subscribe to my channel and have a good day and a lot of fun setting up your bass now