In March of 2018 I bought a used bass online, a Warwick Rockbass Corvette $$ fiver. It was going to take the daily-driver spot from my Ibanez SR505. When I got it, I was horrified. The string heights were atrocious. It was just plain unpleasant to play.
When I began learning to play in 1982-ish I was about 13 or 14. In the early days I went through a couple of basses. They didn’t play very well. I didn’t know it, let alone what to do about it. But as I got better I lucked into a Fender p-bass that was setup well. I used that bass for many years. It never required any maintenance. about 15 years ago I picked up an Ibanez SR300, which, as Ibanez bass guitars almost always do, played very well from the factory. Same deal when I got the SR505. It played great and never needed attention. That all changed when I got the Warwick.
I took it to my local music store. It’s the kind of place that’s full of guitars and basses. Kids take lessons there. They even have a summer break rock band thing that they do with teenagers. Seemed like a hip place. So I took it in and asked them if they could make it play better. I asked them to do a setup on it.
A few days later they gave it back to me and said there was nothing they could do because the neck was twisted. Sorry! I was devastated. I’d paid $600 for the Warwick and it played like shit.
One more data point. I bought an inexpensive Fender acoustic guitar. I thought the action was a little high, so I took it to the music store. A few days later they gave it back saying there was nothing they could do, that the truss rod was maxed out. They told me to just use it to play “cowboy chords” and it would be ok.
Fast forward two years, to the early days of the Coronavirus pandemic. I was stuck at home and watching a lot of YouTube on my tv. That’s when I stumbled on to Dave’s World Of Fun Stuff. The channel was just a guy in a workshop, Dave, who looked to be in his early 60s. Each video on his channel would consist of him showing us a guitar or bass that someone asked him to fix. Maybe they had high string action, maybe they had fret buzzes, or maybe they had crackly electronics. Whatever the deal was, Dave would work on the guitar, often describing what he was doing and why, and by the end of the 15 or so minute long episode, things were put right and the instrument now played correctly.
I binged on DWOFS for a few weeks, learning more and more about how he did his work. Then it began to dawn on me. Maybe I could use what I was learning to fix my Warwick. So I gave it a shot. And it worked.
Then I picked up my Fender acoustic and I fixed that, too.
This led me on a years-long journey of research, trial-and-error, and many, many setups. And here we are. One lesson I think everyone should learn from this is that even if you have a shop in your area and someone in it who’ll take your money, that’s no guarantee that they know what they are doing. Even if you do have someone reliable to take your instruments to, you should still know how to do it yourself.