The ESP Guitar Company

There are actually a variety of other factors as well. The gauge of strings you are using, the tuning and tension, hopefully the floyd is floating level.

I'm an old guitar tech so sometimes I give the local super luthier an extra hand in his shop when things get busy. He's meticulous with micrometers, straight edges, measurements, and all that. Me not so much, but that's because I'm to a point where I do my setups by look and by feel and they come out great. But of course, I'm the low action freak, so what feels good to me might not feel good to the funk player with a telecaster, so I do like my buddy and do things to a standard using the measurements. That way everything is consistent.

One other thing I do when checking action is putting a capo on the first fret to take the nut height out of the equation while making adjustments.

The action on my 1990-ish custom M-II is legendary, so if you want maybe I can take some measurements sometime. The thing practically plays itself, it's pretty stupid. Should be a comparable analog to a KH/Ouija.

JSHRED please would you share these measurements with us? I have a relatively old ESP KH-2 and I cannot for the life of me get the feel/action right. Perhaps some precision will help.
Cheers.

Well, you'll do best to have a guitar action gauge, which is really just a fancy ruler made just for string height.

The trick is to capo the first fret and then check your string height off the top of the 12th fret. I don't have my stuff with me, but I do have my M-II handy, so just looking at it and feeling it I think it's about 5 hundredths of an inch. Which in metric is 1.27 mm I suppose. You may want to go closer to .06 on the bass side to accomodate for the thicker string and its vibration.

Another key is to aim for truss relief that's just a breath shy of being flat while under tension. I could give measurements for all that, but it gets a little involved. I'd say if you can get your fingerboard flat under tension, loosen the truss ever so slightly and you should be in pretty good shape.

Hope this helps.

Why thankyou!
I restrung today as my usual guage (11-52 in e flat) felt too hard to play on a 25.5 scale. So down to 11-48/49?. It is feeling alot better but could be improved. I will take your advice and invest in guitar action guage.

I play Cleartone 10-46 on my M-II and I could not be happier with the speed and tone.