By Tom Mulhern
Unless you gig steadily throughout the summer, you probably put your guitar away for a while, and you don’t play again until autumn, when it dawns on you that you enjoy playing guitar and the weather isn’t conducive to sitting on your porch. Abandoning your guitar for a while can actually be a good thing, believe it or not. Besides letting you gain perspective, it offers you a chance to give your guitar a good tune-up before rebuilding your chops and your calluses.
The first step, I found, is a good examination. Clean off the grime, lint, and anything else (I know, you meant to put it in the case, but shoving it under the bed was easier). Make sure the neck didn’t get knocked out of alignment. When you plug in, make sure the switch(es), knobs, and output jack are okay. If they sound grimy and cause crackles and pops when you plug in (assuming it’s an electric guitar), either clean them with electronic cleaner, replace them, or take the guitar in to a repairperson to fix it up. Pay close attention to the strings and saddles, because (1) strings go dead and (2) saddles get rusty and cruddy.
I examined my cheapo Strat, and almost everything checked out. One gander at the bridge and I was appalled: Not only were the saddles for the lowest three strings rusty and cruddy, but one of the low E string’s two height-adjustment screws was missing. Bummer.
So I trekked down to ye olde guitar shop. Rather than replace just one setscrew, I figured I’d get all new saddles. When I told the salesperson that I needed a set of Strat saddles, she asked me, "What year, and is the guitar Japanese, American, or what?" Duh. So she yanked a whole bunch of different kinds off the wall racks and piled them on the counter in front of me. Hmmm. "I think this is what mine look like," I said, only half-sure. "You can upgrade and get the ones with graphite saddles, or this other kind that’s chunkier–if they fit your guitar," she explained. Figuring that I only wanted to do basic maintenance, I bought the ones that looked like mine and went home.
Sure enough, they were the right ones–very lucky. Moral of this story: Bring any part you wish to replace (or even your whole guitar) when you go to buy parts. This will save you embarrassment, confusion, and possibly a second trip to the guitar store. It could even save you from putting a wrong part on and harming other parts.
Then it dawned on me: I had no idea where I kept my Allen wrench for adjusting the setscrews, and therefore wouldn’t be able to set the proper string height. No matter: I had to go back out to get strings, too, since I had forgotten them on the first trip. Moral of this story: Keep your Allen wrench where you can find it–maybe even in the guitar’s case, rather than in your socks drawer. And try to think ahead to save trips.
This time I was prepared. I brought one of the saddles with me to check the Allen wrench’s size. On the way, I started thinking (Warning! Warning!): What were the gauges of strings I put on the guitar way back in the early spring? All I remembered was that I liked them. By the time I got to the guitar store, I recalled they were light on top and fat on the bottom. Or, maybe, heavy on top. Moral of this story: Keep the package after you change strings, so that you know absolutely what you’ve been picking on.
I settled on a .009 to .046 set, a happy medium, as far as I was concerned. It didn’t really matter too much what gauges I chose, though, since because I was replacing a saddle, I would have to adjust the intonation, right? Just remember: If you don’t know what gauges you last used, check your intonation, in case you bought something different.
So, I put on the new saddles and then the new strings. Next was tuning the guitar and setting the intonation. I used my electronic tuner, but I also used my ears. The key is making sure the 12th-fret harmonic and fingered 12th-fret note match. Play the harmonic, and then play the fretted note. If the fretted note is sharp, then move the saddle toward the guitar’s butt. If it’s flat, move the saddle toward the neck. Remember that you’ll have to keep retuning the string, too.
Once tuned and intonated, my trusty guitar was ready to go. Yeah, I blew the better part of an afternoon on this procedure, partly because of my own inefficiency, but now my guitar’s ready for fall and winter fun. Don’t forget to polish your guitar (once a year, whether it needs it or not!), and check your amp, too.