How to Become a Guitar Repair Technician

how to become a guitar repair technician

My Guitar Repair Learning Journey – 1970

In the early 1970’s I spent many weekends helping out at a luthier’s guitar repair shop in Houston, wanting to become a guitar repair technician.  Everyone held Jerry in awe.  He was in his late sixties and seemed to know everyone and everything about the guitar business.

I gradually came to realize that Jerry (and we, his repair techs) may not be as good as we thought.  Unhappy customers were not uncommon.  Jerry would brush them off with his superior, “I know better than you” attitude.

“Guitars just buzz – that’s a fact of life”, he’d often say.  Yet, nearly half the guitars we worked on didn’t buzz at all.

Was it the guitars, or was it us?

I Decide to Become a Guitar Repair Tech – 2013

When I decided to get back in the guitar repair business around 2013, I realized that I’d better update and upgrade my guitar repair skills.  I spent an entire year watching YouTubes, browsing Facebook guitar repair forums, and I read every guitar repair book I could get my hands on – including Dan Erlewine’s books which were the best of them all.

After a solid year of just learning on the guitars I was flipping, then two years of working on customer guitars from my home, I finally felt I had become a guitar repair technician, I “knew it all”.

Was It Tinnitus?

The buzzing remained.  There were always guitar buzz problems I couldn’t solve.  There were fret leveling jobs that didn’t solve fret buzz.  There were mysterious buzzing issues even when all frets were level, nut slots weren’t low and hardware was secure.

It seemed the more I learned, I’d discover even more things that I didn’t know and couldn’t figure out.

Few Guitar Repair Techs Know..

  • Many Fender USA Strats & Teles have only one string guide – for the b & e strings.  Their g-string is notorious for having buzzing issues and low sustain.  Why?  Because of insufficient break angle behind the nut – especially if the player does not wind strings downward from the peg hole.
  • Stewmac’s fretwork book says to lay a layer of thin CA glue in the slot before using a mallet to install the new frets.  DO NOT do that!  Tiny bits of sanding dust – even though you’ve brushed the slot clean – can remain in the slot.  The glue will instantly harden them and the fret won’t fully seat.  What’s more, you’re likely to spray glue all over the guitar’s fretboard and finish when the mallet hits the fret – not good on a Gibson nitro finish!
  • When you have high frets, DO NOT grab your leveling beam and start to level.  Why?  Because many high frets are actually loose frets, which give the leveling beam less resistance so their neighbor frets get filed down quickly, but not the actual offending fret.
  • You can have perfectly level frets, yet still have fret buzz in the higher frets because.. well,  there are a zillion things like this that you’ll learn in the course, I’m not going to try to lay them all out here.

Real Guitar Tech Experience –

In fact, just last week we, a customer brought in a “brand-new” guitar he’d bought from Sweetwater.  He said it had a few high frets, but new guitars need a setup anyway, so he took it to another guitar tech shop (shame on him!).  When he got it back, the frets had been filed down so low, the guitar wasn’t really playable and now he had even more buzzing frets.

That’s what happens when you try to level loose frets.  We had to break the news to him that he now needed a full refret – which cost about 1/3rd the cost of his new guitar.

Your Choice –

You can become a guitar technician by watching YouTubes like I did.  It takes much longer. And you’ll likely suffer through years of problems, embarrassments and unhappy customers, like I did.

Or you can become a successful, professional guitar technician by learning the proper way from people who’ve “been there”, from experienced guitar technicians who do this work full-time, everyday, and let your 5-star reviews bring  you as many customers as you can handle.

In Guitar Tech Academy’s hands-on guitar technician repair course, you’ll learn to avoid these and dozens of other “gotchas” that can earn you some business-killing 1-star reviews.

And you’ll receive continuing support after graduation through Guitars Done Right. We want to see you succeed. We want to be the school of successful guitar technician graduates.

Guitars Done Right offers a website with online store for your guitar sales, custom back end apps to handle bookeeping, inventory, track repair jobs, print setup certificates, handle marketing, track store traffic and just about everything you can think of to help make your shop a success!