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Yamaha Electric Violin Replacement Nut
Yamaha Electric Violin Replacement Nut
Click picture for more detail
Click picture for more detail
Yamaha is a well-known name in the musical instrument world, particularly for woodwind and brasswind instruments, pianos, and electric violins. They have produced numerous designs and refinement of electric violins, violas, celli, and basses, and have steadily worked to improve the electronics, playability, and in most cases the quality of their instruments without significant changes to the pricing.
While improvements and solid instruments are all well and good, these electric instruments straight from their factory still require the skill of a professional luthier to be made truly playable and optimized for extended use. This is the case for nearly every mass produced instrument purchased directly from a factory or manufacturer. The adjustments a luthier makes may be small, but they are not by any means insignificant.
In the case of this Yamaha electric violin (a few "model years old" when it was brought in) the most noticable set up improvements necessary were replacing the thin, poorly shaped, rough bridge, dressing the fingerboard (a hair raising task considering the fingerboard is only a few millimeter thick piece of lower grade ebony on this model, in order to save cost), re-fitting the pegs, and replacing the nut.
The nut as delivered on the instrument looked to be an injection molded piece of black plastic, and not particularly dense plastic at that. This is likely done to save time and cost for mass production, as individually fitting all the nuts from ebony would be very difficult to automate, and having a standard interchangable "part" makes manufacturing sense. However, it does not make sense from a player's prospective: the nut slots are too deep, prematurely wearing out strings and causing buzzes, the material is not very dense, and will wear quickly, the nut is too tall and so the strings sit very high off the fingerboard, resulting not only in difficulty playing the instrument, but the necessity of the strings being "bent" more when pushed down to the fingerboard, affecting intonation and finger position. The only thing for it is to make a new, custom fit nut from traditional dense ebony.
I neglected to document the rest of the set up work for this instrument, but the nut process was the most time consuming due to the nature of the thin fingerboard.
Yamaha is a well-known name in the musical instrument world, particularly for woodwind and brasswind instruments, pianos, and electric violins. They have produced numerous designs and refinement of electric violins, violas, celli, and basses, and have steadily worked to improve the electronics, playability, and in most cases the quality of their instruments without significant changes to the pricing.
While improvements and solid instruments are all well and good, these electric instruments straight from their factory still require the skill of a professional luthier to be made truly playable and optimized for extended use. This is the case for nearly every mass produced instrument purchased directly from a factory or manufacturer. The adjustments a luthier makes may be small, but they are not by any means insignificant.
In the case of this Yamaha electric violin (a few "model years old" when it was brought in) the most noticable set up improvements necessary were replacing the thin, poorly shaped, rough bridge, dressing the fingerboard (a hair raising task considering the fingerboard is only a few millimeter thick piece of lower grade ebony on this model, in order to save cost), re-fitting the pegs, and replacing the nut.
The nut as delivered on the instrument looked to be an injection molded piece of black plastic, and not particularly dense plastic at that. This is likely done to save time and cost for mass production, as individually fitting all the nuts from ebony would be very difficult to automate, and having a standard interchangable "part" makes manufacturing sense. However, it does not make sense from a player's prospective: the nut slots are too deep, prematurely wearing out strings and causing buzzes, the material is not very dense, and will wear quickly, the nut is too tall and so the strings sit very high off the fingerboard, resulting not only in difficulty playing the instrument, but the necessity of the strings being "bent" more when pushed down to the fingerboard, affecting intonation and finger position. The only thing for it is to make a new, custom fit nut from traditional dense ebony.
I neglected to document the rest of the set up work for this instrument, but the nut process was the most time consuming due to the nature of the thin fingerboard.