Thoughts on guitar maintenance log
Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2010 3:44 am
I’ve been doing this for about a year and wish I had done it a long long time ago. I have a guitar log for each one of my guitars. It’s nothing fancy, just a sheet of lined paper that I write things down such as maintenance items. It started out as a temporary thing to track the humidity of the instruments to make sure I was keeping them at the proper level during the winter, and it has expanded to include some other useful information such as temperature, string changes (brand, gauge, type), and other inspection notes and changes (changed pins/saddle to bone, lowered saddle to change action, etc.). It’s like an automobile maintenance log.
I don’t spend a lot of time on it, and record just the “high points”. It helps me to decide when to change strings and how often I need to refill the case humidifiers (some cases seem to seal better than others, and don’t need to be checked as often, or possibly add another humidifier to the leaky ones).
It isn’t an obsessive thing that I do every time I practice, although I suppose recording how much time a person plays could be useful. It is quite possible that I will stop doing it as I get accustom to the new additions. But, as I get a bit older, it’s too much of a hassle trying to remember all that stuff and much easier to pull a sheet of paper out of a drawer to see what’s been happening. Although, now I have to remember where I put the darn sheets of paper! Thought about putting it on the computer, but that just adds another layer of complication. Maybe a spiral notebook is on the horizon.
I don’t spend a lot of time on it, and record just the “high points”. It helps me to decide when to change strings and how often I need to refill the case humidifiers (some cases seem to seal better than others, and don’t need to be checked as often, or possibly add another humidifier to the leaky ones).
It isn’t an obsessive thing that I do every time I practice, although I suppose recording how much time a person plays could be useful. It is quite possible that I will stop doing it as I get accustom to the new additions. But, as I get a bit older, it’s too much of a hassle trying to remember all that stuff and much easier to pull a sheet of paper out of a drawer to see what’s been happening. Although, now I have to remember where I put the darn sheets of paper! Thought about putting it on the computer, but that just adds another layer of complication. Maybe a spiral notebook is on the horizon.