Guitar How-To

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Acoustic guitar set up involves poking around in, adjusting, cleaning and maybe polishing a fragile musical instrument. If you don’t have prior experience in this area, get some guidance from a guitarist who likes to maintain his guitars or from a luthier. There’s a number of areas to pay attention to when you are engaged in setup and maintenance of an acoustic guitar. How to clean an acoustic guitar is one of the main areas to take care of because if your acoustic guitar is secondhand it could have been sitting around neglected for years. Often people will leave a tuned guitar in a case – or worse, not in a case – in a closet gathering dust.

When you buy a secondhand acoustic guitar, start your maintenance by changing the strings. You can do bracing and neck checks before you take the old strings off and do some cleaning before you put the new ones on.

So any serious maintenance on a newly-acquired secondhand acoustic guitar is to check if the neck is warped. You can easily wreck a perfectly good guitar by letting it sit around with the strings wound up. Before taking your guitar to the shop for a checkup you can do your own basic check by playing every string at every fret. If you don’t get a buzz or a dead sound from any fret, your probably going to be okay.

You can do a visual check on your acoustic guitar’s neck by looking down the neck with your eye at the head. If you decide that the neck is warped, you can try adjusting the truss rod yourself, just do a web search for tutorials. If you can’t find a truss rod you could be in for some serious repairs.

Next look at the area on the top of the guitar behind the bridge. If it is bulging, it needs to be checked for loose bracing. If you look inside the guitar and find a loose brace, you need to glue it back or get someone to do it for you. If the job is not done competently the first time you are only going to need to do it again so if you are not confident you can do it properly, take it to a luthier. If you can’t find a loose brace, then leave the guitar as it is.

As for cleaning, many acoustic guitar players will tell you to leave the guitar as it is. Just give the fretboard a wipe when you change the strings, and wipe any dust from around the bridge and machine heads. If you must apply some kind of liquid to the surface of your guitar, then just wipe it with a damp cloth occasionally.

There’s another school of guitar care that says you should “feed” your guitar’s fretboard by using some kind of cleaning compound on it. If you feel that this is the thing to do, then I’m sure you’ll find something you can use in your local guitar store. Or you can use furniture polish.

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