Maintenance For Your Guitars and Your Cars!

I'm a big believer in regular maintenance on your car. Even in my line of work where it's more of visual maintenance.

You maintain your car mechanical, why not visually?

If not for the stress relief from keeping the interior clean. Or that feel-good feeling of driving around in a shiny car. Visual maintenance will go a long way when trading in or reselling.

A great example of this is playing guitar. Maintaining guitars is actually a combination of mechanical and visual.

Most people know I play guitar. I've been playing since I was 15. Since then, I've collected a fair amount of guitars.

My guitar playing actually came to an almost complete stop about 12 years ago. I would pick up one or two of my favorite guitars, noddle for a minute and that was that.

In the last two years though, I've really had a rediscovery of the guitar and my love for playing has completely come back. I play just about every day and look forward to coming home to pick up a guitar.

In that time that I wasn't really playing though, most of my guitars were neglected.

Since guitars are made of wood, they're organic, and I feel they really have a life of their own.

I really feel that a guitar or any wooden instrument lives and dies depending on our interaction with it.

This was the case with most of my guitars.

I am now spending a small fortune fixing up my guitars now so they are playable again.

Most required complete disassembly and cleaning.

I'm having to buy special tools to fix different parts of the guitars. And since my guitars are different brands, parts and tools are not universal. I have to buy multiple tools to fix the same issue across multiple guitars.

All of this could have been avoided if I would have kept playing or at least regularly cleaned the guitars I wasn't playing.

And if you'd like to know, in the last two years, I spent $1000 fixing all of them. I could have bought a nice guitar for that much or a couple of cheaper ones.

Just a proper setup by a guitar tech is $100-150 which usually includes new strings, adjustments, and cleaning. Mine were all beyond this.

Food for thought if you haven't cleaned your car in awhile.