Good Morning Everyone! I hope you are enjoying the ever changing weather here. Snow to dry, cold to rain and probably back to snow by this weekend. So with the weather like this you might be wondering how your guitar/ukulele/other fretted instrument is doing. Here are a few tell tales to look for:
- Are the frets sharp? If you run your fingers down the side of the neck, do you feel the frets biting at you?
- Are the strings suddenly buzzing every time you strum?
- Does the rosewood/ebony fingerboard/bridge look porous or whiter?
If you answered yes to one or more of those questions it may be time to add some moisture back into your instrument. You may wonder how you do this. It really is not too difficult it just takes time and patience. The easiest way to do it is to put your guitar in it’s case with some humidity. We sell sound hole humidifiers which circulate the moisture into the guitar and that is a sure fire correction. You could put a damp sponge in the case near the neck too, I have seen people do that to great success. I personally have an overly sensitive classical guitar and I put it on a floor stand in the bathroom and then turn the shower onto hot and the fan off (probably not great for the room) and let it steam up for twenty minutes or so and then just sneak in to turn off the shower and back out and let the guitar absorb whatever it wants while the steam dissipates (do not do this if your instrument has built in electronics, that is a terrible idea — and be aware you will want to restring it after it has normalized it’s temperature because you will have ruined the strings on it).
What is your go to solution for adding moisture back into your instrument?
