[Input Needed] Fret Seating Issues on New-ish Guitars

[RandomGuy]

I have an ESP E-II M-I that I bought in March of 2025. Initially, the frets were dead on and everything played really smoothly. A year later, I've got uneven frets all over the board from fret 13 and higher. I'm wondering if shifts in humidity/seasonal changes/environmental changes combined with it being a new guitar have resulted in some frets becoming a little unseated. These are stainless steel frets and they came leveled, nicely crowned, and very polished. When I first got the guitar I could drop the action to 1mm on the bass side and .75mm on the treble side without a problem. Now I'm having to keep it at 1.25mm on the bass side and 1.00mm on the treble side to avoid horrid buzz on the D and G strings on the 12th fret and above. I get this isn't a horrible situation to be in, but this is a pretty expensive guitar and dealing with stainless frets is a bit more expensive than nickel. So I was wondering if any of you had this experience, and if so, what you did to fix it. My first thought is brass fret hammer and see if I can pop them back down. And if that doesn't work just bite the bullet and take them to get leveled.

Thank you all in advance.

 

[Eagle]

It’s not likely to be the frets unseated .
It sounds like the truss rod adjustment is wrong.
The neck will need to be almost dead level to work with the action you stated. That would require at least seasonal adjustment and fairly close attention to keeping the set up .
Don’t go anywhere near a brass hammer. Do you have a trusted technician?

 

[Solarflares]

Eagle is correct.
I too think a minute slackening of the truss-rod is in order, and you will need to carefully ‘work’ the pre-warmed neck, applying pressure with your hands, to help the settle process. Maybe as little as a 1/16th or 1/32nd of a turn would do.
You may have to over-slacken, settle/stretch manually, then gradually come back to suitable tension. Much like you would retune a string to prevent spurious binds and subsequent slip.
With the insanely low action you want to work with - the relief setting process might or might not take a while to get dependable stability. It is do-able - but you might be there all day, and the next, with tiny adjustment. Constantly working the neck towards your goal speeds up the process, and allows you to make broader strokes.
I would begin by working the neck, before anything. Get some hand heat into it, and see if that relief changes in the right direction. That alone should give you an indication of what you are dealing with - and you might well have to vector-in some operating-temperature leeway in standard operation - rather than blinkeredly pushing for an extreme like you did.

 

[DrewJD82]

Yeah, sounds like a little relief tweak will tighten that situation up. If you’re in an area that actually has season changes, seasonal tweaks come with the territory, literally!

 

[RandomGuy]

Thanks for the input. I'll follow this advice and see how it goes. I'm in in the south, but recently moved to a place that has better insulation and feels less humid inside. All my guitars have been adjusting to it, some handling it better than others.