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Joined:
June 2014
Posts: 7
| Hello Ya’ll
I am a song writer and guitar player mostly in the man cave though I used to do gigs and might
start pushing the writing again after I retire as I live just south of Nashville. I have had 2 Ovations b4 a 12 string and a classical. My other guitars are everything from a 52 Gibson Southerner to a FG-180 Yamaha.
I do a lot of my own setup work esp. on my cheaper guitars. Last year I put a pyramid bridge on a 1920 era Super-tone and it came out sounding pretty good IMHO and my tuner thinks so also as it freting true all the way up to the 12th fret
I just got a lovely 1998 DS778 long neck Elite. It sounds great acoustically and pretty nice through the pickup which has a balanced, lo-z output. When playing around the nut it is prefect, however it goes sharp from around the 7th fret up. At the 12th fret it is like 12-15 cents sharp on the low C and about 5 cents sharp on the high C. It came with La Bella’s 80s now I have John Pease 68s but still the upper frets intonation is still pretty sharp. I have tried with all 3 shims in and all three shims out etc. I have cranked on the truss rod a little but no real change, the neck is pretty straight just a little bow. I could go with lighter gauges and maybe tighten up the truss rod some more,maybe…. I’d like to get it to fret true to the 12 fret because I play a lot of jazz songs.
I’d like any advice on how to fix this; I am leaning towards replacing the saddle and pickup. I think I could put a bone spacer and a compensated saddle in and move the saddle back around an 1/8” which should fix the intonation, but I’d like avoid that. On the other I am in no hurry, as it sounds great around the nut. I might try different strings etc any advice would greatly appreciated
thks
Gladu
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Joined:
June 2014
Posts: 7
| Well I went ahead and did it. I replaced the Ovation pickup saddle combo with a 1/4" bone blank, a Gibson radius bone saddle that I compensated and connected a regular piezo under the Gibson. Every thing is working fine and the intonation is now true. I did not cut the Ovation at all and kept the saddle combo if every want to sell it. The only trick was I had use the 1/8 plug off of the Ovation saddle combo to get the Ovation pre-amp to work with the piezo.
I am very happy now the Ovation sounds better then Baritones costing 4 times what I paid for it | |
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Joined:
December 2006
Posts: 6994
Location: Jet City | Hello glad,
Interesting fix. i didn't see your first post.
I don't seem to have intonation problems, but I'm using D'Addario EJ18's
Please provide a pic of the end result. Your membership's been updated so feel free to post throughout the site. | |
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Joined:
June 2014
Posts: 7
| pic following I hope  | |
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DS778 Long neck intonation trbl pls help