How to Maintain Your Guitar

Continuous maintenance of your guitar helps prevent any type of buildup or dirt that may occur. If you take a long time to maintain your guitar, forgetting or simply failing to maintain it may cause the sound to be distorted or even damaged. Here are some useful tips on how to maintain your guitar. If done properly, your guitar will remain in good condition even after many years of use.

It is very important to clean the guitar regularly. If you have an electric guitar, try to loosen the strings slightly so you can remove the dust that is most likely to collect around the pickup. If you have an acoustic guitar, loosen the strings and remove dust from the bridge. You don’t need to loosen them too much, just put a piece of cloth underneath. Poke the hardware to see if it is loose, and if it is, see if there are any screws that can be tightened.

Try to keep the surface of the guitar as dry as possible. After playing, you need to wipe off sweat and perspiration, or the humidity of the surrounding environment, etc., which can easily cause the strings to rust. Use a soft dry cloth to wipe the surface stains to keep the piano body tidy.

You need to relax the strings when you are not playing for a long time. If the strings are tightened for a long time, the fingerboard will be deformed, which will affect the intonation. The string should be half loose and half tight, and not completely loosened, so as to prevent the piano from losing its previous tension and deforming.

When changing strings, avoid sudden and complete string loosening, which may cause the tension on the bridge to suddenly change due to the loosening of a string. Precautions should be taken that the tension is relatively uniform to ensure that the sound can be adjusted and restored quickly after the new string is installed.

Tune your guitar well. Before and after playing, always make sure to tune the guitar to whatever tuning you want to keep the tension of the strings constant and prevent it from breaking easily. One more thing, when you rewind the guitar next time, please make sure that the strings are “stretched” to avoid easy breakage in the future.

Prevent collisions and treat them like other valuables. When the guitar is not in use, the best place to place it is in a box, in a performance bag, on a wall rack, or on a floor stand. Do not place them randomly to avoid unnecessary scratches or collisions.

Storage, long-term exposure to the sun will cause the wood to dry and crack. Once the body of the guitar cracks, the guitar will basically be unusable. The temperature should be appropriate, and the sudden change in humidity will also cause damage to the guitar. Therefore, usually, avoid the guitar in the sun. If the air is too humid, put some desiccant in the piano bag or case.

The best way to maintain guitars is to play regularly. There is no better suggestion. Playing less guitar will result in a shorter life span. Play the guitar regularly. Only when you play it will you realize when it needs tuning, or whether it needs new strings or any other malfunction that might be overlooked when you hardly play the guitar.