Guitar Maintenance Tips to Lengthen the Life of Your Guitar

Last longer!!!

You are about to receive some good news in the form of guitar maintenance tips. Why should you consider guitar maintenance tips good news? Guitars are very expensive and it only makes sense that you follow guitar maintenance tips so that you can preserve your investment. While playing your guitar is your main focus, you should also concentrate on preserving your instrument so that you can continue to play it for years to come. Guitar maintenance doesn't have to be an involved chore. Just following the few guitar maintenance tips listed here can ensure that your instrument will be there for you to play years from now. In addition, if you perform general maintenance on your guitar it is unlikely that you will have bigger problems to worry about later.

The Easy Way to Clean a Guitar

There are plenty of products on the market that are designed for cleaning guitars. There are products to help you maintain your strings. You can buy solutions designed especially for cleaning the fretboard. You can surely try any of these. However, you can use a simple approach to keeping your guitar clean that can save your money. Dust is the main form of debris that will collect on your guitar. If at least once each week (or more if you play often) you dust you guitar, you can prevent dust buildup that can actually affect your playing. If you want to get a bit fancy with your cleaning, you can skip the fancy cleaners and purchase a solvent that is designed to be used on guitars. You can expect to pay only a couple of dollars for solvent, whereas guitar cleaners can cost as much as $10 a bottle.

If you want to take cleaning your guitar a step further, a good polish can help preserve the wood of your guitar and give it an excellent shine. There is one tip to remember about polishing your guitar. Make sure you only use polish that is designed for guitars. Other types of polish can ruin the smooth finish on guitars.

Installing Guitar Strings

When you first learn to play a guitar you will want someone to help you install new guitar strings. Later you will be able to handle this task on your own. You will install guitar strings probably more than any other maintenance task. If you purchase a used guitar, one of the first things you will want to do is replace the strings. A good rule of thumb is to replace your strings every two months. In about this time, the oil from your fingers can over time weaken the strings and their tone.

There are actually several methods that you can use to install new guitar strings. Probably the most common and simplified method that prevents ruining of the string is to allow some slack to fall at the post that you are stringing. Once the string is secure at both ends, simply tighten the string by twisting the tuner until you no longer have any slack.


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Guitar Making is Ancient and Thoroughly Modern

Guitar making today is in many ways a reflection of the history of a variety of wood working crafts and technologies. Many guitars today are not all rosewood and inlay but may have a composite top or back made with modern material. Additionally, with modern lathing techniques, and casting processes, the metal parts of the guitar such as tuners and bridges have progressed to a very high level of sophistication.

Early guitars were fairly simple affairs and possessed much of the basic design concepts we still see in use today. The basic acoustic instrument relied upon its resonating body to form tone, and this body has changed little over the decades. In guitar making, spruce, alder and ash are all used as viable woods for the construction of the body, and are still used today.

In guitar making today the neck of the guitar is most often made from maple, and this is for a very good reason. Early guitars did not use a truss rod (a metal rod running up through the length of the neck) to give it strength. Maple was used for its excellent strength and ability to maintain shape and form under stress. To this day, maple still remains the primary material used for guitar neck construction.

The fret board itself has changed little over the years, it has become more accurate yes, but the general construction techniques used and the materials from which it is constructed remain the same. Some things in guitar making never change. Almost every fret board will be made of maple, ebony or rosewood. All of these are particularly hard wearing woods.

Tuning mechanisms have evolved entirely, from the very early days of a simple peg, held by friction, which was turned to apply or subtract tension to a string. Metal tuning pegs, known as machine heads, provided far more accurate and sensitive string adjustments when they were introduced. Modern tuning mechanisms incorporate not only machine heads, but also fine tuning knobs at the bridge, along with intonation adjusters for each individual string.

Without a doubt, the major turning point in guitar making in the modern age came with the invention of electrical pickups. These were initially simple devices, made up of wire wound around a magnetic core, which were able to pick up (hence the name pickup) the vibrations of the strings above them, and convert it into an electrical current. This electrical current can then be amplified, using standard amplification circuits, to produce a steady tone. Initially these simple pickups were attached to existing acoustic guitars. However, in a very short period of time, the very first solid body electric guitars were being produced, and the face of guitar making and contemporary music was changed forever.

Although modern day guitar manufacturers now use a variety of advanced materials, such as carbon, and composites, to replace many of the traditional materials used in times past, nothing will ever replace the sound of an age- hardened and well loved guitar. Regardless of what materials are used in its construction, the guitar will remain a timeless instrument and guitar making an ancient tradition.
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Make Your Own Electric Guitar

The idea of this article on making your own electric guitar is to give you a real, practical idea of the magnitude of the job and the skills, tools and raw materials needed to make your own electric guitar. The original electric guitar was a railway sleeper with strings. The designer, Les Paul, finally marketed his invention with a guitar shape because he felt that was what people expected of an electric guitar, not because any particular shape was really necessary to make music. One thing you need to get straight on now is you will not save money by making your own guitar. If you want a cheap electric guitar, there's one with your name on it at your nearest music store.

So if you fancy yourself as a designer, you could try making an electric guitar to your own specifications but you will need certain materials to work with. The first thing you will need is a love of working with wood. The second is an arsenal of power tools like drills, routers, saws, and fiddly bits of hardware. Your environment is also crucial. You will need a workspace which is not too hot or cold or wet or dry!

When you design your home made electric guitar, you will need to know how long your neck is going to be and how far apart your frets will be. You will also have a choice of the basic shape of the head of your guitar - the part that holds the tuning pegs.

You probably already know that a pickup near the neck gives a deeper sound than a pickup close to the bridge. The placement and configuration of the pickups on an electric guitar is a science in itself.

Solid body electric guitars are usually made from maple, ash, mahogany, alder, basswood or nut because they possess proven sound qualities for guitar manufacturing. You will need to buy your wood from a sawmill in lengths rather larger than needed for guitar making, and you will need to cut the wood down to size before making your guitar. You will also need hardware like machine heads, pick guards, fret wire, bridge and whammy bar mechanism. You will also need hardware if you use a bolt-on neck.

For the electronic parts of your electric guitar, you will need pickups - single coil or humbucker, shielding to cut down hum and associated knobs, nuts and grommets.

The first job in making your own electric guitar is making a template of your instrument from plywood. The template is your exact pattern for your finished guitar, and needs to be crafted with care. If you find yourself cutting corners at this stage you may as well stop this project and continue with the home brewing you started two winters ago.

To finish off this short essay, I should mention that there exists another solution for people wanting to make their own electric guitar - the electric guitar kit. As an example, the Yamaha EG-112PF Electric Guitar Kit contains: EGP112 Electric Guitar 2 Single coil pickups 1 Humbucking pickup Vintage vibrato system 5 position pickup switch Tremolo bar Master Volume and Master Tone controls Maple neck Chrome closed tuning hardware Bolt-on neck construction Rosewood fingerboard Basswood body No coil split Scale length: 25-1/2" (648 mm) Nut width: 1-5/8" (41mm) Radius: 13-3/4 (350 mm) Frets: 22 Color: Black with white pick guard Guitar cable included GA10 Amplifier 7 watts of power 5" speaker Volume, Tone Bass, Distortion / Clean controls Headphone jack Dimensions: 10.4" (w) x 10.0" (h) x 6.4" (d) Complete Starter Kit Electronic tuner - YT120 Special Yamaha gig bag Extra set of strings Picks Strap with Yamaha logo String winder Capo Guitar method book. I found it on Amazon while looking through 1,320,000 results for a Google search on "electric guitar kits"! Best of luck!

Ricky Sharples has been playing guitar his whole life, and is presently engaged in building a blog called Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free.

Ricky's blog features free tools, lessons and resources for guitarists of all ages and stages. Ricky updates the blog regularly so if you are interested in learning to play guitar there will be an enormous variety of tip, tools and tutorials for you.

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