I spent nearly all of yesterday afternoon restoring hubby’s neglected guitar. He doesn’t play it that much, he’s actually a piano player. It’s a beautiful semi-acoustic Fender. Mine is as well but my dad and I put the pick up in it and mine doesn’t have a cut-away… it’s not as pretty as his.
It’s been in it’s case for ages and I got it out to lend to someone to play at COW Club and discovered that all the frets were green and the strings were rusty. So I went to the music shop and asked their opinion. I bought some new strings and some fingerboard oil and went to town on the guitar. I used a scourer sponge on the tuning pegs and the frets to get rid of any rust and I oiled the fingerboard, it was a bit dried out. Probably about three hours later I put the new strings on and tuned it. It looks and sounds excellent again! I’m looking forward to giving mine a clean up when it needs new strings. How often should one replace them? Do you just wait ’til they look like they’ve had it. I find that the more you play it the longer they last, or the better they look because they don’t go black or rusty.
I’m very proud of my work. I nearly died when the person playing it put it back on the guitar stand but under the stand was microphone cords, they guitar made a move like it was going to fall and if it did it would have fallen a long way! It didn’t thank goodness!