Rick Beato Invited Me To Berlin and we visited the Inventor of the Plek Machine

Massive thanks to @RickBeato for taking me to https://plek.com/

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00:00 – Berlin with Rick Beato
00:25 – The Plek Machine
02:08 – A Problem He Needed To Solve
04:10 – How the Plek Works
09:02 – Calibration
09:37 – A Luthier’s Best Friend
10:41 – Outro

I recently spent the weekend in Berlin with Rick Bato Rick and I were lucky enough to get to meet ger Anker the genius inventor of the pleck machine if you’ve not heard of the ple it’s an incredible tool that’s revolutionizing the way we optimize a guitar’s performance now luus do incredible work

But there’s a limit to human accuracy and that’s where the ple comes in so here we are at pleck house we’re going to find out some things about it it’s um used to do fret dressings and things like that it’s a very expensive machine I don’t know much about it but I’m very

Curious to learn so I invited Mary along who’s here visiting in Berlin where I have my show tonight to see how this thing works all guitars suffer weet and hair as we play them leading to problems like buzz areas on the fingerboard fretwear or an uneven fingerboard you are a blues player and

Uh you ban till major third or whatever yes right then you need to grip uh not to have too low threets because string is uh slide under your finger yeah you don’t want that right uh so this all goes into to the situation where someone is setting the virtual fret dress for

The player okay the reasons for that wear might be very different depending on what style of player you are Jazz musicians and heavy metal shredders are likely to encounter different sets of issues show you the guitar with twisted neck you can see that yep see how

Twisted it is yep and way Twisted Yeah by using the pleck machine you can compensate for that you can compensate for something that’s that Twisted even more this is so cool that I’m here with Rick and what an opportunity to meet the inventor of the Tech Machine the it’s

Just I don’t know very exciting to be here and I feel like I’m filming a documentary with Rick right now G Anor discovered a problem he needed to solve when he took his guitar to be serviced and was unhappy with the results I had a guitar that played very bad had a very

High action and I had not really an idea what was going on so I didn’t like it I went to a lucier and uh he he he said okay I going to fix it when I got the result afterwards I was very unhappy okay he took a block of

Sandpaper got the strings off and sanded the Frets yeah and in that moment I thought wow this is not really a good idea without knowing much about it I was very unhappy and then I took my guitar and run away and say okay I do it myself

Because I’ve seen that and then I started working on the on the ne NE by myself okay and uh yeah then I was just playing the threets playing again and then I noticed oh it’s not so easy because it was buzzing here when I changed something the neck relief oh it

Was buzzing there so I started getting into the idea how should a neck look like and then yeah I got into the idea and built kind of a system in my actually in my my bedroom Alia will have to remove the strings to access the Frets completely changing the pressure

On the neck it’s like trying to ice a cake before you’ve baked it he applied his engineer’s brain to improving the process now it makes sense too because you could have different wear if you play a d chord on a guitar a lot and you

Have a dent in the second fret of the G string for example but yet the second fret of the a string is has no dent in it for example Dred instead ofing the Fret equally all the way across you don’t need to do that yeah with the ple gar has devised an

Incredibly Accurate Way of measuring the curvature of a guitar’s neck known as the neck relief as well as the height and relief of the Frets and the Fret radius over the entire neck all in microscopic detail this computer control device scans the guitar while it’s

Strung and tuned to pitch so you can map it out under its actual playing condition you can see the exact Contours of the neck and Frets giving you the clearest possible indication of any microscopic imperfections all while it’s under tension okay now so now it’s now it’s

Scanned it now the scan has been done and and now we can see a picture if you look at the guitar from this position y you see these are the Frets the nut as you know and this is what you see here the orange line is is the

Guitar and here’s something the green line is the target the green line is what I’m talking T you before string gauge uh instrument type player got it yeah so from there we calculating the green line the target this is what you really want on your guitar to be happy that it plays

Fine okay so that’s the that’s the target so what we do here uh we put these things together there is the measured instrument and then there is the target uh what we really want the first place this is where we put the target to uh to reference points what we

Call to the first fret and to the 12th fret so that is uh where we because normally it has nothing to do it’s a calculation here sure and the instrument here so we put it together we can go through all the strings yeah this is just for one string

Now we see the G string for example oh so that was just one string we were looking at God as you remember yes scanned every string yes uh if the neck is is uh moving in any direction or the Frets are are higher or lower in any

Spot yes each string yeah in a different graph Yep this graph is what we call the virtual fret dress the traditional way is just taking a sandpaper a file a stone whatever to uh get the Fret whatever leveled yeah so we basically we do the same but we can do

It uh in a virtual situation like this because I see where the charget is and I see the real Frets and by the way here these numbers they show me the Fret height okay I I know exactly the height of the Fret okay

So and what I can do here is I can move these around means if I this is too low right this is how you fix this yeah I’m fixing it by uh moving the target uh around till the machine would everything would be the red line would be above every fret

Exactly got it after the scan has been completed you’ll know whether the trust Rod needs to be tightened and by how much whether the nut and Bridge need to be adjusted or replaced overall and for every individual string what the overall shape of the fingerboard is what the

Neck relief is under each individual string and whether it is as good as it could be the height of the Frets and whether there are any potential buzzing issues whether the Fret radius needs to be changed anywhere on the fingerboard if there are buzzing issues we can see how

Much fret material needs to be removed to achieve optimal playability or if the Frets are so worn down that they need to be partially or completely replaced the machine then identifies very precisely what amendments need to be made for perfect fret work and makes them with a

Special cutting tool a process far more accurate than human hands could ever hope to achieve ensuring perfect results when the instrument has been restrung when you have set the virtual fret dress this machine is able to dress the Frets I I want to see it how do how does this

I want to see this in action the tool which runs in front of the yes it it puts a tiny little bit of oil on the Frets to make an nice cut a very soon the ple also works on improving its own processes by conducting an additional calibration scan so it

Records how accurately it made the Amendments it set out to do we scan again after dressing okay which is only important for what we call calibration of the machine because now it is noticing how much it’s supposed to take off and how much it did and from from

There we do little Corrections thousands of millim it’s just incredibly clever engineering the ple is not a replacement for luia the technician’s interpretation of the scan results are just as important a part of the process but it’s an incredibly valuable addition to their toolbox allowing a granular degree of

Accuracy and consistency and taking some of the timec consuming labor out of the job okay maybe I’ll just put it here on the desk yeah you can see the tiny tiny marks the two left but they are almost done yeah if you take a bit of I this is already very

Sometimes see it gets shiny very quickly yeah yeah it doesn’t need much they’re already being used by companies like Gibson to ensure every guitar comes out of the factory in the best possible shape Mary what do you think brilliant brilliant a genius it’s amazing to I mean to meet

The creator of this machine that’s so famous in guitar players it’s um thank you yeah real honor thanks so much to Rick for taking me along for the ride and to Gar Anka for demonstrating his incredible invention and the ple team for showing us around as always I’ll be

Seeing you here very soon so be sure to hit that subscribe button