Does Guitar String Height / Action Affect Tone? | Stringjoy (2024)

• byStringjoy
• | March 1, 2018

Your guitar string height—commonly referred to as action—has a big effect on how your guitar feels and plays. But what does it do to your guitar’s tone? Let’s talk about it.

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Transcription

What’s up everybody, I’m Scott from Stringjoy Guitar Strings coming at you today with a short video talking about whether or not the guitar string height, or the action, affects the tone of the guitar. Let’s dive in.

So, the string height or action of a guitar can vary pretty wildly from instrument to instrument, depending on how the guitar is set up, how the neck is attached to the body of the particular guitar, what sort of bridge setup you have, and a number of other factors.

Basically, it comes down to personal preference. Some players like rather high action—Stevie Ray Vaughan pretty famously liked his guitar string height to be really high. Some players prefer really, really low action—a lot of times metal players, or shredders, or really any genre that requires a lot of speed will favor really really low action. This makes it so that you don’t have to work very hard to press down a particular note, making it a lot easier when you’re playing flurries of notes all across the neck of the guitar.

But, does guitar string height affect more than just the guitar’s playability? Does it have an effect on the tone? In my opinion, yes it does. Higher action tends to sound a lot more open, especially if you’re strumming chords or something like that. This is because there’s more distance between the strings and the individual frets, making it so they can fully resonate without coming into any contact with the frets.

In the extreme, we call this buzzing, but it can be happening in a much more subtle way, with lower action, where you wouldn’t really think there’s something wrong with the guitar, but you’re really not getting the same amount of sustain out of a given note that you would with higher action.

A lot of studio guitarists over the years have used rather high action for this very reason, they like to get that very full, open sound, and eliminate any sort of buzzing or contact between the strings and the frets. The trade-off, unfortunately, is playability. When you have higher action, you have to press down harder to fret a given note, it makes things like hammer-ons and pull-offs quite a bit more difficult, and if you’re trying to do things like sweep picking, it can and get really, really tough.

So the trick is to just remember that it’s a bit of a balancing act. The lower your action, generally, the better the playability for your guitar. The higher action, the more openness you’re going to have with your guitar itself. So it’s important to remember that whichever direction you move in, you’re going to be compromising something, and the trick is to really just find what the right action is for you, that’ll give you all the playability you want, as well as the tonality that you’re looking for out of your instrument.

So, where do you line up? Do you like very, very high action? Do you like your action as low as possible? Let us know down in the comments.