For many musicians, the guitar is more than just an instrument. Whether cheap or expensive, and whether you’re a beginner, intermediate, or advanced player, your guitar is likely to become part of a long and meaningful creative journey.
For musicians who have used the same guitar for many years, either in the studio, on the road, or while performing at gigs, it will feel like another limb or maybe even a family member – something to be cherished, looked after, and prized. However, regular maintenance remains crucial for optimal performance. That could mean regularly changing the strings, adjusting the instrument’s intonation, the environment it’s kept in, or simply keeping your guitar clean and free of dust.
Here we explain the basic steps you need to take to ensure your guitar remains a joy to play for as long as you’re its owner.
Why is guitar maintenance important?
- Sound Quality: Maintaining your guitar's condition and sound quality through regular upkeep and proper care ensures you get the best performance out of your instrument. Whether you’re practicing, performing, or recording, you want to ensure that each note is clear and precise, especially if you want to capture complex chord patterns and solos. One thing’s for certain, dirty or worn-out strings, misaligned parts, or a build-up of dust and grime is likely to dull the instrument’s tonal characteristics, expression, and dynamics.
- Longevity: Taking care of your guitar can significantly extend its lifespan, providing you with years of enjoyment and optimal performance. Checking for loose parts, fret wear, electrical issues (in electric guitars), alongside regular cleaning, lubrication, and proper storage will prevent deterioration and help you to head-off problems before they become significant issues.
- Resale Value: Some guitarists form such an emotional attachment to their instrument that they want to keep it forever - others merely see it as a tool or even an investment. Potential buyers will always appreciate a guitar that has been properly cared for, so keeping the instrument well-maintained and in good condition will protect your investment if you do ever decide to sell it.
A key part of caring for your guitar is to make sure that every note on the fretboard is correctly pitched. Faulty, worn strings, a badly positioned bridge or saddle, damaged nuts, and even moisture, can cause fret distortion requiring the guitar to lose its intonation. Here we explain guitar intonation adjustment and why it’s a crucial part of guitar maintenance.
Understanding intonation
To ensure your guitar practice and performances are both enjoyable and, more importantly, accurate in all playing positions, proper intonation is essential. But what exactly does intonation mean? Basically, it refers to the accuracy of the pitch produced by each note along the entire neck of the guitar’s fretboard. Each fret is intended to produce the correct pitch, but if the intonation is off some notes will sound sharp or flat even if the instrument’s open strings are perfectly tuned.
Intonation issues can be subtle or obvious, but even the slightest imbalance can be noticeable and annoying for guitar players. When you first buy the instrument, many music stores will explain how to set up a guitar and offer free advice and adjustment, but over time environmental issues and lack of maintenance will to lead to wear and tear that can significantly affect intonation making regular maintenance a necessity. You’ll also need to adjust the intonation after replacing the strings, especially if the string length or gauge has not been correctly set.
How to check intonation
First, you’ll want to ensure that you’ve got a well-tuned guitar with the strings properly stretched and the action just how you want it. Once that’s been achieved, start by playing a natural harmonic at the 12th fret and compare it to the fretted note at the same position. The goal is to ensure that the pitch of a fretted note matches the guitar’s natural harmonics. If the fretted note is sharp, the string is too short; if it’s flat, the string is too long. Both conditions indicate an intonation issue that needs to be addressed.
Guitar Intonation Adjustment
After noticing that your guitar needs intonation, you'll need to adjust the length of each string at the saddle, which is the part of the bridge that the strings rest on. This adjustment compensates for the slight stretching that occurs when a string is pressed to a fret affecting the pitch. Essentially, you move the saddle forward or backward to shorten or lengthen the string slightly, ensuring your guitar is in tune with itself.
It’s also worth noting that electric guitars often rely on pickups and amplification, which can mask slight intonation issues compared to acoustic guitars where intonation problems are more easily noticeable. Furthermore, an acoustic guitar typically has a fixed bridge rather than the adjustable bridge of its electric counterpart, while the hollow-bodied construction of an acoustic guitar and the delicacy of its higher string action can also make intonation more difficult to achieve.
The following video by musical instrument retailer Sweetwater shows you how to intonate an electric guitar:
This second video by GuitarNiche offers solutions for acoustic intonation:
Now that you have a more thorough understanding of why guitar maintenance is so important and how to check and adjust to intonation, here are some other practical steps to ensure your guitar maintains its longevity. Before offering maintenance tips, let’s focus on the different types of guitar strings and how they affect the instrument’s sound:
Electric Guitar Strings
- Nickel-Plated Steel: These strings are the most popular for electric guitar players, combining stainless steel wrapped in an 8% layer of nickel-plated wire to produce a full-bodied, versatile, and balanced tone favoured by players who enjoy creating a classic rock sound. The nickel plating reduces deterioration and lengthens the string’s lifespan by cutting down on fret wear.
- Pure Nickel: The standard for electric guitarists until the late 1960s, for a warmer, more vintage tone, pure nickel strings enable guitarists to recreate the sound of their favourite blues and rock guitar icons. Pure nickel tends to feel a little stiffer than its nickel-plated counterpart and might therefore feel tougher to play.
- Stainless Steel: If you want your electric guitar to produce a bright, sharp, and crisp tone, then stainless steel strings are the way to go. Most commonly used within the metal and hard rock genres, they’re likely to last for years and will remain structurally stable in terms of their intonation, but they’re also more likely to lose their gleam than nickel-based strings.
Acoustic Guitar Strings
- 80/20 Bronze: These strings provide the quintessential acoustic guitar tone most frequently heard on records made during the 1960s and ‘70s. With their deep, rich, and bright harmonics, 80/20 acoustic strings produce a remarkably crisp, bassy, and well-balanced tone
- Phosphor Bronze: Made of 92% copper, 8% tin, and trace amounts of phosphorous, these strings possess a longer lifespan than 80/20 bronze. The combination of elements increases their strength and resistance to corrosion while producing a warm, well-balanced tone with excellent durability. This makes phosphor bronze strings popular for both fingerpicking and strumming techniques.
- Silk and Steel: As the name implies, silk and steel guitar strings are a hybrid of the two elements. Consisting of a central steel core wire with a thin layer of silk filament sandwiched between the core and the outer wrap, these strings have a softer feel and mellower tone, making them ideal for fingerstyle playing and folk music.
Cleaning Guitar Strings
Ensuring every component of your guitar functions smoothly is the key to it remaining enjoyable to play, and you’ll know when it’s time to change strings because, apart from visible signs of wear and tear, they’ll start to produce a dull sound and you’ll have regular tuning issues.
Washing your hands before you start to play guitar and wiping the strings down when you’ve finished practicing or performing will make a big difference to their upkeep, and there are various cleaner products to help keep strings in mint condition.
Other Maintenance
Even if you play guitar regularly, you’re likely to find dust hiding in all kinds of nooks and crannies, so it’s always handy to have a can of compressed air nearby to blow away that excess dust. Most of the action happens on the frets, so keeping this area of your guitar clean is vitally important and can be achieved by using a small, dry brush to clear away often barely noticeable grime and dead skin cells.
While the metal component of an electric guitar, such as the knobs and pickup nuts don’t need quite as much attention as the wood, keeping these areas clean can still greatly improve performance. This can be achieved using your typical scanner glass cleaner spray. Simply squirt the solution onto a rag and gently wipe the surface down to keep it nice and shiny.
You’ll also want to avoid moisture, as wood can sometimes warp or split in moist conditions. The solution is fairly simple. If your guitar is being kept somewhere that’s potentially damp, either keep a small humidifier by its side or make sure it’s always kept in its case in-between sessions.
How to Change Guitar Strings
For optimal performance, ideally, you should be looking to replace guitar strings anywhere between every one and three months. Although restringing electric and acoustic guitars follows the same fundamental principles, this step-by-step guide for removing and installing guitar strings highlights any theoretical differences between the two types of instruments:
- Loosen and remove the old strings – First, you need to turn the tuning knob to unwind each string, and although you don’t need to use a string winder to achieve this, doing so will make the job go a lot faster. Pluck the string to make sure you’re turning the knob in the right direction and then loosen all of the strings moving from the highest to the lowest. To save removal time, you can use a pair of wire cutters to cut and discard the strings, but doing so at full tension might result in them rebounding on you.
- Remove the bridge pins – Unlike electric guitars, acoustic guitars have bridge pins that need to be removed. Try inserting a firm, padded object inside the guitar’s soundhole and pushing the pins upwards from the bottom. Alternatively, use a bridge pin puller to efficiently remove the pins from the guitar bridge. Once removed, keep all the pins in the correct order, as there may be subtle variations in hole size that require them to be refitted in their original positions.
- Clean the guitar – Now that the strings have been removed, you have a great opportunity to clean off any dust and grime from the instrument’s fretboard, soundhole, or headstock.
- Insert new strings – Once cleaned, you’re now ready to put the new strings on. For acoustic guitars, thread the string through the bridge and secure it by reinstalling the corresponding bridge pin. It’s important that the ball end of the string is seated properly, so you may want to reach into the soundhole and reach for the ball end to ensure that it’s making contact with the bridge plate. Most electric guitars do not have a soundhole and the strings are held in place at the top of the guitar. Before removing, take careful note of how the strings are installed so you can attach the new ones in exactly the same way.
- Attach strings to the tuners - Once the new strings are attached to the bridge of your guitar, take the first string and slot it through the hole of its complementary string post ensuring that you leave enough slack to end up with the right amount of subsequent wraps. You’ll ideally want to have at least three inches of excess string tailing out of each tuning post.
- Wind the strings – Now you’re ready to wind the strings around the tuning post. Always wrap the strings towards the inside of the headstock. This prevents the strings from interfering with each other and ensures that the tuning keys all turn in the same direction. This also makes future tuning much easier. For the first revolution, you want to make sure that the string is being wound over the hole in the tuning post with subsequent winds placed under the hole to create a clamp that stops the excess string from slipping out of its tuning post. Once completed, bend the excess string upwards to keep it out of the way and stop it from scratching the headstock. At this point, there’s no need to worry about accurately tuning the guitar. Simply wind the string until it creates enough tension to make a note before clipping off the bent end as close to the tuning post as possible. Once achieved, moving on to the next string.
- Tune the guitar – Now that the strings are all in place and at tension, it’s time to properly tune your instrument. Initially, the strings may not be accustomed to the tension being placed on them, so to speed up the process, lift and stretch the strings by about half an inch to help ensure they’re fully settled before you start playing. You can perfect the tuning process by ear, but may also find it useful to buy a headstock tuner from your local guitar shop.
Luthier Service
For beginners, in particular, a guitar maintenance kit is likely to include many of the tools required to help you maintain your guitar. However, if you feel insecure about how to change guitar strings or adjust the truss road, bridge, and intonation screws on the pickup, you may find it worthwhile to visit a guitar shop that employs a luthier. A luthier is a skilled craftsman who makes and repairs stringed instruments and can provide your guitar with a thorough check-up or make advanced adjustments to help keep it in tip-top condition.
Conclusion
Maintaining your guitar is a job in itself, but incredibly valuable for several reasons. First, you can only take control of your musical journey if your instrument is performing at its best. Proper care will prevent intonation problems, fret wear, or hardware malfunctions, and by learning to fix any issues that arise you'll be better equipped to handle unexpected problems during practice or performances.
By understanding the intricacies of your guitar, you’ll better grasp what’s needed to keep it in prime condition. Regular maintenance not only extends your guitar's lifespan but also saves you time and money. However, the best thing you can do for your instrument is to play it frequently. This practice allows you to identify and address potential problems early, fostering a sense of pride and an emotional connection to your guitar, knowing that your care and attention have contributed to its well-being.
