Basic Guitar Maintenance

An important part to playing electric guitar is knowing how to maintain your instrument. Guitar maintenance includes restringing, setting your action & intonation, caring for the wood and hardware, setting pickup height, and cleaning out pots.

Basic Tools you will need: 
Screwdrivers in a variety of sizes (flat head & phillips)
Polish (I use Gibson polish which won't damage a nitrocellulose lacquer guitar)
Lemon oil (for your rosewood fretboard)
A tuner (to properly intonate your guitar you need a strobe tuner)
String winder
String cutter
DeoxIt (to clean out your pots)
Allen wrenches (2 sizes to fit your truss rod & saddle height screws)

Restring Tips 
Remove all strings from your guitar.
Take this short opportunity with your strings off the guitar to wipe down the pickups, pickguard, and condition your fretboard with lemon-oil if you have a rosewood fretboard. To condition your fretboard, put a drop of lemon oil on the fretboard every 2 or 3 frets then go back and rub it into the wood. Allow it to be absorbed into the fretboard and then wipe off the excess.
When putting on your new fresh strings, try not to add a ton of windings around the tuning post. I pull the string all the way through the post then grab the string at the nut and pull it back to the first fret. This will give you enough winding, but not have a huge pile of string around the post.
Once you get the strings on, tune to pitch, then give each string a solid tug, and then tune again. Doing this will stretch your strings so they don't fall out of tune while stretching while you play.

Setting your Action
Action refers to the height of the string off the fretboard. There are two factors that control your action: neck straightness & saddle height at the bridge. To check how straight your neck is you can look down the neck from nut to bridge (and vice versa) using the strings as a guide to judge if the neck is backbowed or has too much relief causing the strings to be hard to fret. If the neck is not straight, you can adjust for a back bow by tightening your truss rod or add relief by loosening your truss rod. Remember, Righty Tighty, Lefty Loosey. Once your neck is straight you can set the action at the saddles if further adjustment is needed. First measure the fret at the 12th fret with a string height gauge or ruler with 64ths on it, it should be somewhere between 2/64 to 4/64 to play well and not buzz. You can then change the height of each string by adjusting the saddle screws. Once they are raised or lowered ever so slightly, measure again at the 12th fret to achieve an even action across the fretboard.

Setting Intonation
If your guitar seems to not be in tune as you play further away from the nut and higher up the neck, your intonation is probably out of tune. Setting your intonation isn't rocket science, but does recor

You will need a strobe tuner to set your intonation properly. The basics start with tuning the string open. After it is in tune open, fret the string at the 12th fret and check the tuning on your strobe tuner. If this is out of tune, you will need to adjust the intonation screws on the back of your bridge. Moving the saddle forward will raise the pitch, and pulling the saddle backwards will lower the pitch. After adjusting, tune the string open again and check it again at the 12th fret. Repeat this process until you have the string in tune open and at the 12th fret. Do this on the rest of your strings and you will have a guitar that is in tune all the way up the neck.


Other maintenance tips
Check your input jack to make sure it is tight and doesn't become loose.
If your volume or tone pots become scratchy they can be cleaned with DeoxIt. It can be sprayed in the opening of the pot on the inside of the guitar and then worked through by adjusting the knob.
You can use Big Bends Nut Sauce or GHS Graphit All to lubricate your saddles and nut of your guitar with bigsby or tremolo to help it stay in tune when you do some sweet dive bombs.
Polish your guitar, especially if you have nitro lacquer, leaving sweat on it will damage the laqcuer.
Never leave your guitar in the car. It doesn't matter whether it is hot or cold, it will cause the wood to move, the neck to warp, and could potentially damage how your guitar plays.
Use steel wool to polish the frets and keep grime from collecting on them.


I am a big believer in knowing how to maintain your own instrument, and being able to understand the magic that is done if you get your guitar setup by a professional tech. In most cases, a guitar tech can put some extra magic from all the experience they have had doing setups. There is nothing wrong with taking your instrument in and getting it professionally setup from time to time, but I definitely recommend you doing regular maintenance. This will help you know how to fix a problem that could arise before a gig and keep you from going into panic mode.

Rock!
Ted Strange