Wednesday

How To Clean Your Acoustic Guitar

By Pete Morris


Almost all guitarists want to take care of their guitars and maintain them, allowing them to be played for many years. One of the major ways just about any guitarist can take proper care of his guitar is to try to clean it routinely. The main problem is most guitarists don't know how to clean and maintain their guitars. In this posting, I am going to explain to you how to clean your guitar and what products are safe to use.

I'm certain what you are thinking. Big deal, polishing my guitar will not help it last longer. That is certainly just entirely wrong. Cleaning a guitar doesn't just help it last longer; it will likely protect against future guitar repairs. If you clean your guitar regularly, you normally examine it more in detail and find a lot more things such as if it is dry or swelling or in need of repair. Many of these early on signals could prevent harm and reduce future guitar repairs.

Alright, enough about the warnings. Let's start cleaning. There are many of unique polishing products available for guitars and the majority appear to be very good. In spite of this, there is no need to purchase over priced polishing products just because they are "made for guitars." Some common furniture products work fine. I really like to use a mixture of cleaning products to clean my guitars along with my customers' guitars arrive in for guitar repairs. Here's a few things I like to do.

Tips on how to polish your electric guitar body

A lot of guitars have glossy finish. This can be great simply because that generally glossy finish is much easier to clean than flat finish. There's two varieties of cleaning solutions: sprays and pastes or gels. In my experience, I don't use anything but aerosol cleaning products on my guitars. I'm sure these solutions do a good job eliminating the dust and finger prints at the same time providing a smooth shine. My personal favorite spray cleaner is Dunlop Formula 65 Polish Cleaner. I commonly just spray a couple of squirts over the guitar body. On electric guitars, be sure not to spray your pick-ups, as almost any form of solution might cause oxidation on the pickups. Then have a very soft rag, ordinarily I use an used t-shirt, and swirl in the cleaner. When the grime is taken away from the guitar surface area, I take a polish cloth and buff the finish to a nice shine.

If the guitar has splits in the body or any open wood, make sure never to use any sort of cleaning product on the open wood. This could make the wood swell and ruin the finish. It becomes an type of another unnecessary journey to the guitar repair shop.

The right way to clean and polish your guitar fretboard.

Almost all guitars excluding many Fenders and Gretsches have unfinished fretboards. The popular unfinished fretboards are frequently manufactured from ebony and rosewood. Unfinished fretboards are really simple to clean, condition, and look stunning. You will need to clean your fretboard and condition it each and every time you switch your strings. Fretboards can normally dry out and split. You don't want to bring your guitar to the guitar repair shop as a consequence of something which may have been stopped. Here's how I like to clean and maintain my fretboards.

There are numerous of specific fretboard cleaning and polishing products out there, although I prefer use Murphy's Oil Soap the best. Oil soap not just assists clean your fretboard, it also helps condition and moisturize it. The oil soap prevents your fretboard from drying out and breaking. It will also give your fretboard a fresh clean gloss.

I prefer to pour a small amount of oil soap on top of the fretboard. This doesn't take a lot at all -a small amount goes a long way. I Then use some #0000 steel wool and rub the oil soap to the fretboard while taking out the filth accumulation. Be sure you you cover your pickups so that parts of the steel wool don't get magnetically caught to the pickups. It's always a good idea to shine the frets while the steel wool is saturated in the oil soap. Doing this the entire fretboard and all of the frets look shiny and brand new all at once. Once the fretboard and frets are cleaned and polished, you'll want to wipe away the extra oil soap using a piece of paper towel. Now your fretboard is clean and conditioned and your frets are nice and shiny.




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