Setup and action: why high strings quit more players than talent does
Let's talk about something nobody explains to beginners, and I think that's a real gap in how guitar gets taught around here. It's not chords. It's not strumming patterns. It's the guitar itself, and whether it's fighting you before you even start.
The nickel test
Here's the thing I wish someone had told me thirty years ago. I bought my first guitar used off a guy up in Lehi, cheap, seemed like a fine deal at the time. The action on that thing — action just means how far the strings sit above the frets — was so high you could've slid a nickel under the strings at the twelfth fret. I didn't know that was a problem. I just figured guitar was supposed to hurt that much and sound that hard to play cleanly.
I played it that way for a year. A full year, building calluses in the wrong places and blaming myself every time a chord buzzed or wouldn't ring out. My fingers still remember that guitar, honestly. Not fondly.
Nobody told me the guitar was the problem. I assumed I was the problem. And I feel like that's the story for a lot of people who quit guitar in their first year — they don't quit because they lack some gift for it. They quit because they were playing an instrument that was actively working against them, and they didn't know there was another option.
What "high action" actually costs you
When the strings sit too far from the fretboard, every single thing gets harder:
- Chords take more finger strength than they should, so your hand fatigues fast and you associate guitar with pain instead of progress.
- Barre chords, which are hard enough already, become close to impossible, because you're pressing down that much farther.
- Intonation suffers, so even when you get the chord to ring, it might sound slightly off, and you won't know why.
- You build tension in your hand and wrist to compensate, and that tension turns into a habit that's hard to unlearn later.
That last one is the one that worries me most as a teacher. A bad habit built to survive a bad setup follows you for years. You fix the guitar eventually, but the habit's already moved in and set up furniture.
How to check your own guitar at home
You don't need a repair shop for this first pass. Here's what I do:
- Look down the neck from the headstock, like you're sighting down a rifle. You're checking whether the neck is basically straight, with maybe a hair of forward bow. A big warp or bow is worth having a tech look at.
- Press down at the first fret and the last fret at the same time, using two fingers, one on each end. Look at the gap between the string and the frets in the middle, around the seventh or eighth fret. There should be a small gap, maybe a business-card's thickness. If your finger touches the string easily with no gap, or if there's a big gap you could work a pencil into, something's off.
- Check the action at the twelfth fret the way I wish someone had checked mine. Measure or eyeball the distance from the top of the fret to the bottom of the string. As a rough starting point, something in the range of 2 to 2.5 millimeters on the low E and less on the high E is common for an acoustic. If you're way above that, high action is likely part of what's making things harder than it needs to be.
- Play an open chord and a barre chord and pay attention to how much force it takes. If your hand is shaking with effort on a simple G, that's information.
If any of this raises a flag, take it to a shop and ask for a setup. It's usually not expensive, and it is, in my opinion, the single best money a beginner can spend on this hobby. Better than a new guitar. Better than a lesson, some months.
My opinion on this, plainly stated
Cheap guitars are fine. I don't think you need to spend a lot of money to learn on something decent. But a bad setup is not fine, and I'd put it this way: high action has quit more beginners than any actual lack of talent ever has. If you've been struggling and telling yourself your fingers just aren't built for this, I'd want you to rule out the guitar before you rule out yourself.
One caution, since we're talking about hands-on work: if you ever adjust a truss rod yourself, go slow, quarter turns, and stop if you feel real resistance. It's easy to do damage rushing that. For most people, especially starting out, this is a "take it to someone" job, not a "watch a video and go" job. I read the footnotes on this one because I made a small mess of my own neck once, adjusting too fast. Learned from it.
Before next time: do the nickel test, or your own version of it, on whatever guitar you've got at home, and bring your findings to class. If it's high, don't panic — we'll talk through options, and it might explain a few things you'd been blaming on yourself.