just to explain that intonation means, in my explanation of it, setting a string's length so that a note will sound correctly where it's supposed to be played, ie- on the high E string at the 5th fret the note sould be A, if it's incorrect you could get a note which is sharp or flat.

Don't worry excessively about it just for now, that can be explained in detail later.

I guess we're talking about your Squier here(?)- in general Fender and Gibson seem to send out guitars with 9s as standard so those are probably what you've got, if you're fairly new to playing then 10s will wear your fingers a bit much, so stick with 9s for a while longer (the 9 or 10 refers to thousandths of an inch).

Here's a halfassed workaround i use for strat types, slacken the strings, pop them out of the nut and rest them against the side of the neck (4,5,6 to the left-1,2,3 to the right)tape them gently if they wont stay - this should give you room to scrape away fairly strongly with a plastic card at your blemish. You could try pstring's naptha suggestion if it wont come off with simple scraping, he know what he's talking about, using a fair amount of care you shouldn't hurt anything.

If the strings are off for an hour or so you may not have to do any intonation work.

Intonation is a big word,but, hell if i can do it..

I cant type as well as some so instead of explaining how i do intonation i'll let someone else explain it better,i won't point you at Fender's site as it's gone to shhite for product support, but this explanation used to be on their site a long while ago.

http://www.o-ma.com/hog/techtips.html#1

Good Luck, you should be fine.



[Edited by James8831 on 03-24-2002 at 04:04 AM]