Hi everyone,

I've got a Grand Stick with the divided truss rod and have an odd sitar-like buzzing but only on the highest string on the bass side and the highest string on the melody side, around the 5th fret. My neck is perfectly straight when viewed from the side (string of lights) and the instrument plays perfectly everywhere else. I can get rid of the buzz by loosening the truss at either end, or by a combination of both, but the action becomes too high for my liking, and I'd rather not have to sacrifice playability over the entire board for the sake of one specific fret on two strings.

Any advice would be sincerely appreciated.

Cheers,
James

I had a similar issue but on my Old music Man guitar, nothing wrong with the neck, fret was not loose etc.. Can you hear buzz when unplugged?

Yeah, the buzz is audible acoustically as well.

Have you tried raising the bridge height a tad on that one string?

I wouldn't mess with anything, except for the truss rod. I made the mistake of touching the other stick settings and made things much worse....ended up having to ship the stick back to SE to reset everything.

Just today I had a similar issue. the second high melody string was too low, totally muted out. All of the other strings were fine, but they went sharp big time after 3 days of sitting. I adjusted the truss rod, retuned the strings and bingo! All issues were fixed. Playability was great, as usual. Changes in weather seem to affect this stick a lot, but thank god for that easy truss adjustment....

Hi James,

Buzzes that show up on the highest strings indicate truss issues, for sure.

If the buzz is at fret 5, this indicates that the top truss nut is too tight, creating an arch in that section. If you loosen it a bit, and find the action too high, just tighten the low nut to compensate.

if the top nut is correct, the instrument will fret out at the X fret first when the bottom nut is too tight.. If the top nut is too loose, then the instrument will fret out at fret 7 when the bottom nu is too tight.

Good luck!

Thanks, Greg! I'll give that a shot.

I say leave it as is and sell it on ebay as a rare Stickitar
originally owner by Yngwie J Shankar the unheralded master of the instrument who met with an untimely end after accidentally releasing a fooking furry.

The furry community has since apologized for the incident and stated in no uncertain terms that yiffing should be approach with due care.

After what seemed like endless adjustments of the truss at either end, resulting in mounting frustration (not to mention all the time taken away from playing), the buzz just kept moving from one place to another. So, completely fed up, I threw caution to the wind, tried something else, and voila! The buzz is gone.

Based on something Greg had mentioned in a previous post, I decided to remove the three screws from the centre of the board and eliminate the divide in the truss. It now acts like the original adjustable truss rods did before the divided truss was introduced. So, I now have a 2-way truss rod, but adjustable at either end.

An additional bonus to this - for me at least - is that I have the Lap Dawg, which makes adjusting the truss near the belt hook somewhat tricky at times because it interferes with the wrench. I can now do all of my truss adjustments rod at the headstock!