Chasing a Buzz After the Performance
- May 19
- 3 min read
I had a great time meeting people and playing music at the Steveston Spot Prawn Festival the other day.
While I was playing, I noticed a bit of buzzing from the guitar. It was not terrible, but it was enough to make me wonder what was going on.
The first question was: is the neck moving, or are the frets worn down?
If the neck has shifted, that can usually be corrected with a truss rod adjustment. But if the buzz is coming from worn frets, then it may require fret leveling — something I would rather avoid if possible.
So when I got home, the first thing I checked was the neck relief.
There are many ways to check neck relief, but the method I often use is to hold down the first fret and the last fret at the same time, then lightly play or tap the string in between to see how much clearance there is. This method is easy to find online, and it gives a quick sense of whether the neck has enough relief.
In this case, when I held down the first fret and the last fret, the string did not really ring at all in the middle. That told me the neck was likely back-bowed — meaning the neck had moved slightly away from the string tension side, bringing the strings too close to the frets.
Before adjusting the truss rod, I started wondering why the neck had moved.
The biggest recent change was not the string gauge, but the string material. I had switched from phosphor bronze strings to monel strings, while keeping the same medium 13–56 gauge.
Phosphor bronze is a standard acoustic guitar string material. Monel, on the other hand, is a nickel-copper alloy. It looks and feels much more silver than bronze, and the alloy is generally nickel-heavy, often around 65–70% nickel.
I started comparing the density of the materials:
Monel: around 8.44–8.83
Phosphor bronze: around 8.5–8.9
Monel seems slightly lighter, but the difference does not look dramatic.
I also looked into the string tension numbers. From what I could find, there does not seem to be a huge tension difference between medium-gauge phosphor bronze and medium-gauge monel strings, at least not enough to clearly explain the change on its own.
So at this stage, I cannot say for sure how much the change in string material affected the neck. But looking into it was a good learning process.
A guitar neck is always sitting in a balance between string tension and truss rod tension. Even if the string gauge stays the same, small changes in material, construction, humidity, temperature, or storage conditions can shift that balance slightly. If the setup was already close to flat, even a small change can become noticeable as fret buzz.
After checking the neck, I moved on to the actual adjustment.
Since the neck was back-bowed, I adjusted the truss rod in the direction that loosens it, allowing the strings to pull a little more relief back into the neck.
I turned the truss rod about 1/8 of a turn and let the guitar sit for a while. After that, I could already notice a small change. The guitar felt a little better, but there is still a bit of buzz, so turned a little bit more and am going to let it settle for a few days and check the neck again before making any further adjustment.
For now, I am glad that the first sign points toward a neck relief issue rather than a fret problem. Hopefully, a careful truss rod adjustment will be enough.