Tele buzz/choking out - neck relief, shim, or something else?

Snags

Got an old Fenix Tele copy that has been neglected for far too long, and now have a use for.

Went to give it a quick tweak and set to open G and although the action isn't desperately low it's getting dreadful fret buzz/choking  out on the lower 4 strings, although especially the E, A and G (D isn't quite so bad for some reason).

From memory it's currently strung with 9s although I'll be putting it back to my more normal 10s (broke the top E trying to sort the intonation before I noticed the awful buzz).

The low E starts buzzing at the 7th fret. 6th is clear, 7th is toss, and it gets worse the further up the neck you go. Similar for the A, D and G, although they all start to go crap a bit further up the neck, but once it bites, it gets worse the higher you go.

No obvious signs of fret sprout, and whilst I'm sure the nut isn't great (as per the factory in early 2000s I guess) it's not been this awful in the past.

The neck has been off a couple of times, so I know it's shimmed with  couple of thin shims at the cup of the pocket. The shims have always gone back exactly where they were originally.

Before I start swinging on the truss rod, is it likely just going to be a case of adding a bit more relief with the truss road then tweaking the saddles to refine the action again (6 saddles) or do I need to wave it at a grown-up?

paulnb57

Go right back to basics and set it up from scratch.....

Maynehead

The symptoms would indicate too much relief to me, followed by someone lowering the saddles to compensate.

I’d set the correct amount of relief first, then adjust (probably raise) the saddles to stop the buzzing in the higher frets.

Funkfingers

DGDGBD tuning puts slightly less string tension on the neck than EADGBE. Changing to tens might be enough to restore the correct relief. 

If the action is already high and you have buzzes and choking on some strings but not others, it is possible that the neck is twisted.

Snags

Thanks all.

Dug out an ancient set of feeler gauges (memo to self: new feeler gauges required) and hit up Google. Looks like it's a combo of factors - too much relief, as suggested here and I suspect a few high frets.

It's a lot better after a few adjustments:

- popped the neck off and took the shim out (couple of small bits of wet'n'dry that must have gone in at the factory) which were set to ever-so-slightly raise the end of the neck
- re-seated bridge plate, as realised I may have been a tit when I changed the pickups a while back and trapped too much of the earthing wire under there (I had, now much better)
- re-strung with 10s
- tuned to standard
- adjusted neck to get 8 thou at the 8th fret, broadly as per Fender guidelines (even though it's a Fenix, and I have no idea what the radius is and no radius gauges - however, it's fairly flat, so took a punt)

After that lot it's now pretty good on all strings up to around about the 19th fret. Some strings are good all the way up to 21, and some choke out after 19, and some choke on single frets between 15 and 19 then clear again, so I'm suspecting that there are just some high spots on some of the frets.

Going to set the intonation and action and see where it ends up, play it for a bit (I'm not going to get much above 14th fret for what I wanted it for in the short term) and get together the bits I need to level the frets, as it's not an expensive guitar so I can take a careful run at it as a learning experience.