That’s not a typo; I didn’t mean £150. For just £1.50 and 30 minutes of your time you can transform your guitar – even if it has the nastiest plastic nut fitted. The secret of this is the ‘V’ shaped jeweller’s file. A complete set of diamond-coated jeweller’s files (or non-diamond-coated versions of the same) cost around £8 on eBay or Amazon… but since you only need the ‘V’ shaped one, let’s call it £1.
If you do nothing else to your cheap (possibly unplayable!) guitar, take this £1 file and use it to cut the nut slots down until the strings sit about 0.3-0.4mm above the 1st fret. If you have feeler gauges use these; if not find something that IS 0.3mm and use that (there’s a supplier on Amazon / eBay that sells stainless steel 0.3mm picks for about 50p for example!).
Once you’ve got all your strings at 0.3-0.4mm over the 1st fret you’ll have a nut that looks like the inside of a shark’s mouth BUT you’ll be amazed at two things: first, your guitar will suddenly feel really easy to play – and that’s without even touching the bridge action and second, the guitar stays in tune even though you know the strings are sitting in the tip of a ‘V’ notch (assuming you’ve stretched out your new strings until there is no more detuning when you pull them hard or bend a huge note…)
If the shark’s teeth offend you (rest assured they WILL offend the guitar connoiseurs out there partly because of how they look but mostly because you had the cheek not to spend £100+ on a set of Japanese nut files!) you can file down all the excess material above the strings. Don’t be afraid to do this: that material is now pointless; it’s not doing anything. You DO need to stop before you eradicate the slot altogether – the string has to have enough depth of slot to sit in to stop it moving sideways – but that’s not hard to get right after a few tries.
Presto! A massive £1 improvement that will have taken you about 30 minutes. Ok, £1.50 if you include the 0.3mm guitar pick 🙂
