Crafting a bone nut for a Gibson Songwriter Deluxe

If your guitar starts buzzing on the open notes regardless of how much reliefe in the neck, then chances are your nut slots have gotten too low. They're no longer capable of clearing the first fret and unlike most adjustable bridges, you can't just raise them up. Some people will opt for a cheap and cheerful fix bu packing the slots with some compound and glue, but it will fail in time. It also causes some issues with tuning stability as the coefficient of friction is higher. The best option is to replace the nut entirely. 

Once we cut the old nut free, we prep the slab for thicknessing and roughing in the width.

Measuring up the slab after thicknessing it to the correct size. We'll rough it in and start sanding down the top.

Using a flat pencil, we trace the profile of the frets onto the blank giving us the optimum height for the nut and ensuring we won't have too much material to impact tuning stability.

The side profile taking shape. We cut the angle on top of the nut steeper than the headstock angle so the string can ramp off with ease.

Setting the string spacing giving enough room inset from the edges so the strings don't fall off, but not too bunched up that you can't comfortably play chords.

The final product after setup. With the nut cut and shaped, then polished up to a light sheen, it had just enough material under the strings to minimise any bunching up and the slots cut to the correct profiles. 

If you're looking to get a buzzing nut fixed, contact us about what we can do to get you back playing. We even accept repairs shipped in from across the country.