Greetings!
When my Mayones Reguis 7 arrived a few years ago one of the first things I did was to change the strings to a heavier gauge. All was well. After a few years I started to notice a horrible plingy, plinky, harmonic type sound, imagine playing a harmonic an inch away from the bridge, when palm muting the low B - 7th string. After some experimenting I notice that it was caused by the nut. I filled the nut slot with the old super glue baking powder trick and the problem was solved.
Recently I change my string gauge to be lighter and the problem returned, this time on the low E – 6th string. Being higher in pitch the sound is even more annoying. It should be noted that the problem is only when playing open note palm mutes, fretted notes sound fine.
Straight away I went for the fill the nut slot solution but it didn’t work. It did make it slightly better I think (confirmation bias?). After more experimenting, filling, raising, etc I decided this nut had to go so I replaced it with a new pre-cut XUSQ XL. It made no difference.
So after even more experimenting I fashioned a temporary Zero fret nut and the problem is gone.
Can anyone offer me some idea of what the problem is and how to fix it? I’m sure your saying ‘why not just install a proper zero fret nut’ and I may do that, but I’m not sure that’s the right solution for me.