New to guitar here, but I paid about $50 to have my Special II set up a professional. He spent a lot of time filing and working on the nut. However, once his entire set-up was complete, I've had really no problems with the guitar staying in tune. I can tell that a lot of the components of this guitar are cheap (right away we had to replace the output jack). But I've been really happy with the tuning stability on mine.