
Have you ever wondered why your guitar plays great one day, yet feels completely different on another?
Have you ever wondered why your guitar plays great one day, yet feels completely different on another? Suddenly the fret edges are sharp or the action has shifted and the guitar won’t play in tune anymore. These changes can happen overnight, especially in the winter. Cold, dry weather brings low humidity and that causes cracked guitars. Winter is my busiest time of year for structural repairs, and most of these repairs are preventable with an inexpensive humidifier. I’ve been preaching this message for more than two decades: Preventive measures are the key to keeping your guitar in top condition.
Dealing with humidity.
Humidity is the amount of moisture or water vapor in the air. The more moisture in the air, the higher the humidity. Lesser amounts of moisture results in lower humidity.
There’s a popular myth that a guitar sounds better when it dries out. Actually, it just cracks and then I get to charge a fortune to repair it. This myth is often confused with a guitar’s natural aging process. When a guitar ages, cells in its wood begin to crystallize and harden, causing the guitar to get louder and more dynamic. But if it’s not properly humidified, the wood will crack. (Did I mention structural repairs are very expensive?)
But you can have too much of a good thing: When a guitar is over humidified, it swells up and loses volume and tone. (Think of a tub of lard with strings.) High humidity can also cause finish discoloration and even allow mold to grow inside the guitar.
The way to avoid these problems is to maintain a consistent humidity level for your instrument—particularly an acoustic hollowbody. This will prevent a host of ailments and costly repairs.
Symptoms of low humidity.
One of the common telltale signs of a dry guitar is sharp fret ends. When a guitar dries out, the fretboard shrinks and the frets protrude beyond the wood. Correcting this problem requires re-humidification, conditioning, and fret filing. If your guitar is showing signs of low humidity (sharp fret ends, cracks, or separated glue joints), you need to have it evaluated by a reputable luthier.
This is what happens to a dry guitar in various levels of low humidity.
LEFT: Fig. 1. This top cracked from lack of humidity. MIDDLE: Fig. 2. Fretboards can also crack as a result of low humidity. RIGHT: Fig. 3. The Humidipak guitar humidifier system.
Photo courtesy of Planet Waves
Below 35 percent humidity:
- Action (string height) changes.
- The top flattens out.
- Fret ends feel a little sharp.
Below 25 percent humidity:
- Fret ends become very sharp.
- There are drastic changes in the playability.
- Seams begin to separate.
- There’s a slight separation between the bridge and top.
- The finish starts to sink.
Below 15 percent humidity:
- Cracks appear in the top and body (Fig. 1).
- The bridge and fretboard crack (Fig. 2).
- The glue joints in the neck, bridge, and braces begin to separate.
What is the best humidity level for my guitar?
Most experts say 40-50 percent. At this level, a guitar will sound and play its best. A great way to control humidity is to use a humidifier. Think of it as an inexpensive insurance policy to protect you from very expensive repairs.
A guitar humidifier is easy to use and very effective. Some guitar humidifiers are suspended between the 3rd and 4th strings and contain a damp sponge that needs remoistened every two or three days. This type of product works okay, but it’s not consistent. The humidity will spike at first, then slowly diminish as the sponge dries out.
The more modern guitar humidifiers use a gel that not only emits humidity, but also absorbs it if the humidity gets too high. This technology was first developed for cigar humidors, and now it’s available for guitars. Planet Waves makes a great humidity control system called the Humidipak that uses this technology (Fig. 3.). I’d also recommend using a hygrometer to measure the humidity.
LEFT: Fig. 4. A room humidifier in action. MIDDLE: Fig. 5. Thanks to heat exposure, this bridge separated from the top leaving a gap big enough to slide in a seam separation knife blade. RIGHT: Fig. 6. Use a wood conditioner to protect your rosewood or ebony fretboard.
Another great way to control humidity is to use a room humidifier. This is a great idea if you have multiple guitars in one room. Humidifiers come in all shapes and sizes, but be very selective, as some work much better than others. I use a programmable humidifier that utilizes both “warm mist” and “ultrasonic technology.” It also has a built-in hygrometer and a UV light to help purify the water. This type of humidifier is much healthier than the “cool mist” types that require a filter.
What guitars need to be humidified?
All guitars should be humidified, even electric solidbodies. Newer guitars generally need more moisture because the wood is kiln-dried, as opposed to a vintage guitar made from air-dried wood. The difference between kiln and air-dried wood is dramatic. Kiln-dried wood uses heat to dry the wood to accelerate the aging process. However, these guitars require more moisture to prevent warping and cracking. Air-dried wood is more stable, especially in vintage guitars, because the wood was generally aged over a decade before being made into a guitar. As a result, the cracked wood was removed from the pile and used for something else. Guitars made from air-dried wood still need humidity to sound best, but they retain moisture better than their modern counterparts.
Too hot to handle!
Heat exposure can also have destructive effects on a guitar. When a guitar is left in the trunk of a car—especially on a sunny day—the glue joints can fail. Imagine the shock of opening your case and finding a pile of wood where your guitar used to be. Once again, I get to charge a fortune for repairing heat-damaged guitars, so be vigilant.
A frigid nightmare.
Cold is also an enemy. When a guitar is exposed to low temperatures and then brought into a warm environment, the finish can develop checking. Checking creates tiny hairline cracks in the finish—like someone laid a spider web over the finish— and you can’t polish this out. Finish checking is permanent and can only be repaired by refinishing (not something I would recommend). Finish checking is basically the result of the finish changing from one temperature extreme to the other. This causes the finish to expand and contract too fast, and that makes it crack. To minimize this, when you bring your guitar in from the cold, don’t open the case until the outside of the case is at room temperature. Even then, there’s no guarantee the finish won’t check, but it will lessen the odds.
Okay, let’s review—here’s how to prevent damage to your beloved guitar:
- Buy a guitar humidifier.
- Keep your guitar at between 40–50 percent humidity.
- Use a hygrometer.
- Keep your guitar in a consistent environment (one that’s comfortable for you).
- Keep it out of direct sunlight and out of the car trunk.
These simple steps can save you hundreds of dollars in repairs.
[Updated 12/30/21]
- Acoustic Soundboard: Humidity—Friend and Foe - Premier Guitar ›
- Acoustic Soundboard: Just Say No to Cracks - Premier Guitar ›
- Tools for the Task: Guitar Humidifiers - Premier Guitar ›
- Guitar Shop 101: Using Super Glue in Guitar Repair - Premier Guitar ›
- Keep Your Eye on the Hygrometer: Your Bi-Annual Humidity Reminder - Premier Guitar ›
Whitman Audio introduces the Decoherence Drive and Wave Collapse Fuzz, two innovative guitar pedals designed to push the boundaries of sound exploration. With unique features like cascading gain stages and vintage silicon transistor fuzz, these pedals offer musicians a new path to sonic creativity.
Whitman Audio, a new audio effects company, has launched with two cutting-edge guitar pedals, the Decoherence drive and Wave Collapse fuzz. Combining science and art to craft audio effects devices, Whitman Audio aims to transcend the ordinary, believing that magic can occur when the right musician meets the right tool.
Delivering a solution for musicians looking to explore a wide range of sounds, each pedal offers a unique path to finding your own voice. The Decoherence drive injects a universe of unique saturation into your music arsenal while the Wave Collapse fuzz takes you to uncharted sonic territories.
Decoherence features include:
- Cascading stages (Gain A > Gain B) each with a unique sound and saturation character
- Gain A - Medium to high gain stage with a mid focus for clear articulation and punch
- Gain B - Low to Medium gain with a neutral EQ that compliments and expands Gain A
- G/S Toggle - Selects the clipping diodes for Gain B (NOS Germanium or NOS Silicon)
- Tone Knobs (H & L) - Tuned active Baxendall style EQs that boost or cut Highs and Lows
- True bypass switching, accepts standard 9V DC power supplies (does not accept battery)
Introducing: Decoherence Drive - YouTube
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.Wave Collapse features include:
- Vintage Silicon transistor fuzz that goes from vintage clean to doom metal mean
- Buffered input and pickup simulation ensure it sounds great anywhere in your chain
- Bias Knob - Allows for a huge range of texture and response in the pedals gain structure
- Range and Mass Toggles - Provide easy access to three diverse bass and gain ranges
- Filter Knob - A simple-to-use tilt EQ enhanced by the Center toggle for two mid responses
- True bypass switching, accepts standard 9V DC power supplies (does not accept battery)
The Decoherence drive and Wave Collapse fuzz pedals carry retail prices of $195.00 each.
For more information, please visit whitmanaudio.com.
Introducing: Wave Collapse Fuzz - YouTube
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.We know Horsegirl as a band of musicians, but their friendships will always come before the music. From left to right: Nora Cheng, drummer Gigi Reece, and Penelope Lowenstein.
The Chicago-via-New York trio of best friends reinterpret the best bits of college-rock and ’90s indie on their new record, Phonetics On and On.
Horsegirl guitarists Nora Cheng and Penelope Lowenstein are back in their hometown of Chicago during winter break from New York University, where they share an apartment with drummer Gigi Reece. They’re both in the middle of writing papers. Cheng is working on one about Buckminster Fuller for a city planning class, and Lowenstein is untangling Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s short story, “Three Paths to the Lake.”
“It was kind of life-changing, honestly. It changed how I thought about womanhood,” Lowenstein says over the call, laughing a bit at the gravitas of the statement.
But the moment of levity illuminates the fact that big things are happening in their lives. When they released their debut album, 2022’s Versions of Modern Performance, the three members of Horsegirl were still teenagers in high school. Their new, sophomore record, Phonetics On and On, arrives right in the middle of numerous first experiences—their first time living away from home, first loves, first years of their 20s, in university. Horsegirl is going through changes. Lowenstein notes how, through moving to a new city, their friendship has grown, too, into something more familial. They rely on each other more.
“If the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band, without any doubt.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“Everyone's cooking together, you take each other to the doctor,” Lowenstein says. “You rely on each other for weird things. I think transitioning from being teenage friends to suddenly working together, touring together, writing together in this really intimate creative relationship, going through sort of an unusual experience together at a young age, and then also starting school together—I just feel like it brings this insane intimacy that we work really hard to maintain. And if the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band without any doubt.”
Horsegirl recorded their sophomore LP, Phonetics On and On, at Wilco’s The Loft studio in their hometown, Chicago.
These changes also include subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in their sophisticated and artful guitar-pop. Versions of Modern Performance created a notion of the band as ’90s college-rock torchbearers, with reverb-and-distortion-drenched numbers that recalled Yo La Tengo and the Breeders. Phonetics On and On doesn’t extinguish the flame, but it’s markedly more contemporary, sacrificing none of the catchiness but opting for more space, hypnotic guitar lines, and meditative, repeated phrases. Cheng and Lowenstein credit Welsh art-pop wiz Cate Le Bon’s presence as producer in the studio as essential to the sonic direction.
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little.”–Nora Cheng
“We had never really let a fourth person into our writing process,” Cheng says. “I feel like Cate really changed the way we think about how you can compose a song, and built off ideas we were already thinking about, and just created this very comfortable space for experimentation and pushed us. There are so many weird instruments and things that aren't even instruments at [Wilco’s Chicago studio] The Loft. I feel like, definitely on our first record, we were super hesitant to go into territory that wasn't just distorted guitar, bass, and drums.”
Nora Cheng's Gear
Nora Cheng says that letting a fourth person—Welsh artist Cate Le Bon—into the trio’s songwriting changed how they thought about composition.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Devices Plumes
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- TC Electronic Polytune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex .73 mm
Phonetics On and On introduces warm synths (“Julie”), raw-sounding violin (“In Twos”), and gamelan tiles—common in traditional Indonesian music—to Horsegirl’s repertoire, and expands on their already deep quiver of guitar sounds as Cheng and Lowenstein branch into frenetic squonks, warped jangles, and jagged, bare-bones riffs. The result is a collection of songs simultaneously densely textured and spacious.
“I listen to these songs and I feel like it captures the raw, creative energy of being in the studio and being like, ‘Fuck! We just exploded the song. What is about to happen?’” Lowenstein says. “That feeling is something we didn’t have on the first record because we knew exactly what we wanted to capture and it was the songs we had written in my parents’ basement.”
Cheng was first introduced to classical guitar as a kid by her dad, who tried to teach her, and then she was subsequently drawn back to rock by bands like Cage The Elephant and Arcade Fire. Lowenstein started playing at age 6, which covers most of her life memories and comprises a large part of her identity. “It made me feel really powerful as a young girl to know that I was a very proficient guitarist,” she says. The shreddy playing of Television, Pink Floyd’s spacey guitar solos, and Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan were all integral to her as Horsegirl began.
Penelope Lowenstein's Gear
Penelope Lowenstein likes looking back at the versions of herself that made older records.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Westwood
- EarthQuaker Bellows
- TC Electronic PolyTune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex 1.0 mm
Recently, the two of them have found themselves influenced by guitarists both related and unrelated to the type of tunes they’re trading in on their new album. Lowenstein got into Brazilian guitar during the pandemic and has recently been “in a Jim O’Rourke, John Fahey zone.”
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument,” Lowenstein says. “And hearing what the bass in those guitar parts is doing—as in, the E string—is kind of mind blowing.”
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little,” Cheng adds. “And also Lizzy Mercier [Descloux], mostly on the Rosa Yemen records. That guitar playing I feel was very inspiring for the anti-solo,[a technique] which appears on [Phonetics On and On].”This flurry of focused discovery gives the impression that Cheng and Lowenstein’s sensibilities are shifting day-to-day, buoyed by the incredible expansion of creative possibilities that setting one’s life to revolve around music can afford. And, of course, the energy and exponential growth of youth. Horsegirl has already clocked major stylistic shifts in their brief lifespan, and it’s exciting to have such a clear glimpse of evolution in artists who are, likely and hopefully, just beginning a long journey together.
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“In your 20s, life moves so fast,” Lowenstein says. “So much changes from the time of recording something to releasing something that even that process is so strange. You recognize yourself, and you also kind of sympathize with yourself. It's a really rewarding way of life, I think, for musicians, and it's cool that we have our teenage years captured like that, too—on and on until we're old women.”
YouTube It
Last summer, Horsegirl gathered at a Chicago studio space to record a sun-soaked set of new and old tunes.
Featuring torrefied solid Sitka Spruce tops, mahogany neck, back, and sides, and Fishman Presys VT EQ System, these guitars are designed to deliver quality tone and playability at an affordable price point.
Cort Guitars, acclaimed for creating instruments that exceed in value and quality, introduces the Essence Series. This stunning set of acoustic guitars is designed for musicians looking for the quintessential classic acoustic guitar with fabulous tone all at an exceptional price point. The Essence Series features two distinct body shapes: The Grand Auditorium and the OM Cutaway. Whatever the flavor, the Essence Series has the style to suit.
The Essence-GA-4 is the perfect Grand Auditorium acoustic. Wider than a dreadnought, the Essence-GA-4 features a deep body with a narrower waist and a width of 1 ¾” (45mm) at the nut. The result is an instrument that is ideal for any number of playing styles: Picking… strumming… the Essence GA-4 is completely up for the task.
The Essence-OM-4 features a shallower body creating a closer connection to the player allowing for ease of use on stage. With its 1 11/16’th (43mm) nut width, this Orchestra Model is great for fingerpickers or singer/guitarists looking for better body contact for an overall better playing experience.
Both acoustics are topped with a torrefied solid Sitka Spruce top using Cort’s ATV process. The ATV process or “Aged to Vintage”, “ages” the Spruce top to give it the big and open tone of older, highly-sought-after acoustics. To further enhance those vintage tones, the tops bracing is also made of torrefied spruce. The mahogany neck, back, and sides create a warm, robust midrange and bright highs. A rosewood fingerboard and bridge add for a more balanced sound and sustain. The result is amazing tone at first strum. 18:1 Vintage Open Gear Tuners on the mahogany headstock offer precise tuning with vintage styling. The herringbone rosette & purfling accentuates the aesthetics of these instruments adding to their appeal. Both acoustics come in two choices of finish. Natural Semi-Gloss allows the Sitka spruce’s natural beauty to shine through and classic Black Top Semi-Gloss.
A Fishman® Presys VT EQ System is installed inside the body versus other systems that cut into the body to be installed. This means the instrument keeps its natural resonance and acoustic flair. The Presys VT EQ System keeps it simple with only Volume and Tone controls resulting in a true, crisp acoustic sound. Lastly, Elixir® Nanoweb Phosphor Bronze Light .012-.053 Acoustic Strings round out these acoustics. This Number 1 acoustic guitar string delivers consistent performance and extended tone life with phosphor bronze sparkle and warmth. The Essence Series takes all these elements, combines them, and exceeds in playability, looks, and affordability.
Street Price: $449.00
For more information, please visit cortguitars.com.
Cort Essence-GA4 Demo - YouTube
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.Moth Electric's C. regalis overdrive pedal offers massive boost, natural overdrive, and searing distortion for guitar and bass. With active treble and bass controls, clean blend, Smooth/Crunch modes, and true-bypass switching, this USA-made pedal is a versatile addition to any pedalboard.
Adding a new model to their line of overdrives, Moth Electric has released the C. regalis. Equally suited for guitar and bass, the meticulously designed C.regalis is capable of massive boost, natural, singing overdrive, and searing mid-gain distortion. Its six op-amps power a dynamic, crunchy overdrive circuit with a suite of features including:
- Active treble and bass controls that allow for +/- 15db boost and cut. Perfect for tailoring the C. regalis to your instrument and amp.
- A powerful clean blend for introducing either your amp’s natural character or another effect into the equation. Allows the C. regalis to become a more transparent overdrive.
- Smooth/Crunch modes, provide a subtle change in feel with ‘Smooth’ increasing sustain and ‘Crunch’ introducing high-order harmonics for additional texture.
The C. regalis offers the following features:
- Bass, Treble, Blend, Volume, Drive controls
- Smooth/Crunch modes● More volume than you’ll ever need
- True-bypass switching, top-mounted jacks for easy placement on crowded pedalboards
- 9-volt DC operation with external power supply – no battery compartment
- Designed and hand-built in the USA using through-hole components
The C. regalis carries a $179.99 price and is available for purchase at mothelectric.com.
For more information, please visit mothelectric.com.