Taking Care Of and Tuning Your Guitar

When your guitar has been used for a while it might be in need of some TLC. As well as a restring and a set up you can also use some great guitar cleaning products to assure your guitar is receiving the correct treatment. These products consist of lemon oil which you use when you take your strings off and put it on the neck.

However, you would only use this on rosewood fingerboard as it is openly pawed, unlike maple fingerboards which are closed pawed. Guitar polish is the next product and you would use it to clean your body, headstock and back of your guitar. It will make your guitar look sparkling clean and like you have just bought it. It is best to use a good cloth to wipe off the polish as well. A clean cloth that hasn’t been used before would be best. Fret mate is the best solution for keeping your strings clean and fresh.

All you do is after everytime you have finished playing the guitar, apply it to the strings by rubbing it up and down and it stops your strings from rusting out and getting old. There are also other solutions for this such as buying guitar strings that are coated such as elixir strings or D’Addario exps. Lastly, Servisol is great for giving your electronics a bit of a clean. All you do is insert the straw into the bottle and spray into the jack. This should clean out your electrics and increase performance. We sell all these products at our rimmers music Southport store and we would be more than happy to instruct you on how to use them. We can also restring and set up your guitar including a clean for £25.00. We also sell single strings.

Tuning your guitar

When tuning your guitar it is always best to actually have a chromatic tuner. You can get them in a variety of different forms such as one that you can clip onto your headstock which is very handy because it is extremely portable and is operated by battery. These tuners are accurate and very convenient.

You can also get pedal chromatic tuners which you can also power via a battery but also by mains. These are not portable and would be benefited a lot more by being a part of your pedal board next to and linked to all your other pedals. Chromatic tuners tend to be a lot more accurate as your jack cable is being plugged directly into it. These are very popular when playing a gig at a venue either as a band or on your own. You can even get some that when you strum all 6 strings at once and it will tell you whether all your strings are in tune or not.

You can also get tuners that sit inside the soundhole and you never need to take them out. These are in my opinion the best because it is always there and you don’t have to worry about taking it out and putting it back in. All the tuners I have just mentioned come in a variety of different ranges, brands and prices. However, we sell all of them at our Rimmers Music branches. If you would even like to bring your very own guitar in to try it with and make sure you are happy with it we would be more than happy to do that for you. The headstock tuners start at around £9.99 but the more you spend the better the quality and the more features you have.

If you would like more information or help with the maintenance of your guitar, please give us a call or come in and see us, we are expertly trained and would love to help you to get your guitar in top condition.