Help! – My Neck is Warped!

Understanding why guitar necks sometimes get bent out of shape

Because guitar necks are made of wood, they do bend. More than most may realize, there are two scenarios where your neck will very likely bend to some degree:

1. Weather changes: Humidity affects wood. You may have noticed once or twice in your life that a door in your house makes contact with the floor and is hard to open or close, but then later in the year the problem magically goes away. This is because the change in seasons (depending on where you are geographically, in some cases where there is little variaion on the seasons, the issue will me minimal). As long as your neck is properly finished, there is nothing you can do about this except keep your guitar properly setup. Fortunately, this should only be an issue twice a year (i.e. major changes from summer to winter to summer, etc..)

2. Changes in tension on your neck. When your guitar is working perfectly, a big part of the reason is that someone (either you or a qualified guitar repair technician) has set your truss rod to strike the right balance between wanting the neck to be straight, yet compensating for the tension of your strings.

When you change the tension of your strings in either direction (i.e. using lighter OR heavier strings) you upset that balance. In your case, using heavier strings has most likely cause the neck to “Bow” inwards. This is a problem. Unfortunately, lowering your action does not easily rectify the problem.

What needs to be done: Your truss rod must be adjusted to compensate for the additional tension of the heavier strings. One of the downsides of a wood guitar neck is that any time you use considerably heavier or lighter strings, your truss rod will most likely need to be adjusted. This is not an exact formula because all necks are different and some necks will need more, less, or in some odd cases, no adjusting at all (unlikely, but I’ve seen this happen).

This was a long answer to a short question, but I hope that the explanation helps you to understand what happened and why. The best advice I can give you is to have a qualified guitar repair technician handle this for you. Adjusting your truss rod yourself and having it not go well will be much much worse than the relatively minimal cost of having a qualified guitar repair technician resolve this problem for you (and potentially more expensive)

The good news is: Once it’s done, it’s done! (unless you decide to use significantly heavier or lighter strings again : – )