How To Setup A Gibson Les Paul Part 2 (Teardown)

Part 2 of our How To Setup A Gibson Les Paul Studio series. Removing the old strings, getting the hardware sorted out and batching processes to save time!

Part 2: How To Setup A Gibson Les Paul

The second segment of our nine part series on how to setup a Gibson Les Paul. Time for teardown – removing the old strings, getting the hardware sorted out and batching processes!. You wanna get it done? let’s get started:

Video: Les Paul Setup Tutorial Part 2

Transcript:

Removing the Hardware

The first thing we’re going to do is get our truss rod cover off. We’re also going to take off our pick guard, put that aside. Get yourself a new tray, good deal, anything that will hold it, a bowl or whatever, it’s all good.

All right – batch your processes. Do one thing and then…because you got six strings on the guitar so you’re probably going to do that six times. So if you’re going to unwind the strings, unwind one unwind the next and unwind all the strings, so that’s done.

Removing Old Strings

Get rid of the strings all in one shot. Now back here I’m going to not worry much about this coming off because I’m going to reset those studs, okay? If you want to keep your studs in place, you don’t want them to move around, you can use different methods.

You can put an elastic band around and keep them from chattering, just carefully take the tail piece off. Just put an elastic band on there and it’ll keep things pretty organized for you. The old strings go in the garbage.

Same thing with our bridge, you want to put an elastic band around there. If you have it set and you’re just doing some housekeeping that’s awesome. Let me get rid of these strings, these are all coming off.

All right, love doing this, one two, one two and in the garbage it goes. All right, I’m going to raise these pickups a few turns.

I will reset them later, so I’m not worried about – that’s got some junk in it. I’m not too worried about where the pickups are sitting at the moment because I going to reset them.

Setup Tools:

That’s a little awl, it’s just an old jeweler’s screwdriver that I filed a real sharp point on to get into some stuff. It’s a handy tool to have around, but these screws are kind of messed up. Okay, so I’m going to use a finer tipped blade screwdriver that’s got some good bite to it, see if I can get that. Yup, that’s fine.

Dealing with Damaged Screws!

These screws are fairly, well, they’re kind of pooched. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to take that pickup out and I just happen to have some screws that I can replace those with, because these are really quite damaged.

And this is not part of our setup procedure, but you know what it is, that’s what happens when you get into instruments that come in and get these surprises.

Nice to see it’s nice and clean in there, there’s no monkey business going on. Another thing you can do is if you want to make an adjustment, you’re just doing it the hard way, but you can push that down and try to turn that with your finger. It’s a bit of a sketchy thing.

Next, I’m going to go hunt down a couple of screws to replace these and then put it back in place and nail it back down again and then we’ll carry on. Next…

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