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How to Play Bentonia Blues - Sep. '19 Ex. 5

Whether or not your guitar’s been frozen in its cryosleep case for the winter, you’ll want to take some steps to make sure it experiences a healthy thaw.

Managing your instrument’s humidity and temperature are important pieces of a year-round maintenance regimen.

Here in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, we’re going from the dry, cold conditions of winter to the warmer, humid conditions of spring. As you probably know, these fluctuations can impact the well-being of your beloved instruments. So, here are some tips from our team on how to effectively care for your acoustic guitars during these seasonal shifts.

Before delving into specific tips, it's crucial to understand how seasonal changes affect acoustic guitars. Wood, the primary material in our guitars, is highly responsive to variations in temperature and humidity. When exposed to dry and cold conditions, wood tends to contract, leading to potential issues like cracking and changes in playability. Warm and humid conditions can cause the wood to expand, resulting in swelling, warping, or changes in tone.

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Photo by Jesse Dylan

Why you might be your own most important DIY project.

This is our annual DIY issue, where we share a few interesting projects—this time, a guitar mod that's a lesson in the proper way to use a router and six pedal-kit builds—that can be done fairly easily, in one day. The idea is to showcase attainable work that builds basic skills needed for more complex projects.

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Steve Albini in the control room at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago.

Photo by Kevin Tiongson

Words of wisdom from the legendary engineer, proprietor of Chicago’s Electrical Audio, World Series of Poker champion, and, in the band Shellac, the compass for brutal guitar aesthetics.

“All day every day, we’re grinding it out,” says engineer Steve Albini of his team at Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio he built and has run since 1997. “We’re constantly in session, constantly under fire.”

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