Putting padding around your guitar’s headstock is the best way to ensure it from being damaged during shipment.
You can reduce your fears about shipping your instrument by taking the right steps to protect it in transit.
Even if you own only one instrument, if you’re an active guitar player, chances are good that sooner or later you’ll have to pack your guitar for shipment. Although it’s hard for some packers to realize, the dangers of shipping your guitar by UPS or FedEx are essentially the same as putting your guitar on an airline’s luggage conveyor belt when you fly.
Of course, thousands of guitars are safely shipped and flown in airline baggage holds every day with no protection besides a hardshell case. But a significant percentage are damaged, too, so the tips you’ll read here will improve your odds. And even when a guitar is in its case and the case is in a sturdy cardboard box, shipping a guitar is risky business. Is shipping a guitar or flying with it riskier than it used to be? You bet. Is there anything you can do to improve your guitar’s odds of survival that doesn’t cost a fortune? Absolutely.
Although caved-in guitar tops and splintered sides do occur sometimes when an acoustic guitar is shipped, the chances of that type of damage when the instrument is in a sturdy hardshell case, especially when the case is boxed, are actually quite slim. And by far, the most common shipping damage to guitars is shared equally by solidbody electrics, which probably tells you that I’m referring to the dreaded cracks that appear around the base of the headstock. This is so common that it’s sometimes called the “airline break.”
What confuses many people is that, despite the fact that their guitar arrived at its destination with a cracked neck, the shipping box shows no damage whatsoever. Along with the mystery of how the crack could have occurred is the added misery of realizing that filing a damage claim with the carrier is usually fruitless, because there’s no sign of mishandling. And repairing the cracks are only part of the pain, for even with the best possible repair yielding a good-as-new result, the guitar’s value has been diminished.
“No matter what the speed your guitar’s case is traveling, the best insurance you can give your instrument for safe arrival is to limit the distance its headstock can travel when the case comes to an abrupt halt.”
If you think of it as a whiplash injury, the cause of the cracks to your guitar’s headstock is easy to understand. Your guitar’s case, or the shipping box containing the case, was traveling at significant speed, but then its movement was stopped abruptly. Maybe it was dropped, or maybe it was on a conveyor system and a jam halted everything instantaneously. The damage occurred because the headstock had room to move within the case, and so it did—resulting in a crack where the headstock curves down at the nut. This is much the same injury as when your guitar is knocked off its stand and falls face-first on the floor. Even nice carpeting won’t save your guitar from headstock cracks for the same reason.
Especially when fitted with cast, enclosed tuners with metal buttons, a guitar’s headstock is a heavy object, and its momentum is simply more than a typical narrow mahogany guitar neck can withstand. A set of metal button Gotoh 510 tuners, for instance, weigh approximately half a pound. That’s about a third of the total weight of a typical mahogany neck on an acoustic flattop. And, of course, the cracks almost always appear around the nut, where the neck is narrowest and where there’s a significant angle. This can also happen when a guitar, in its hardshell case, is left standing vertically on end. If the case is knocked over and the guitar lands face-first, that short drop is sometimes enough to crack a headstock because the barrel of the neck has far less room to move within the case compared to the headstock.
I could natter on for pages about how the dramatic increase in shipping traffic in recent years has resulted in far larger, longer, and faster conveyance systems for both airlines and shipping companies. But no matter what the speed your guitar’s case is traveling, the best insurance you can give your instrument for safe arrival is to limit the distance its headstock can travel when the case comes to an abrupt halt. You can add stiff padding behind the headstock, which functions similar to the headrest in a car, and supplement that with additional padding over the face of the headstock that is slightly compressed when the case is closed. The objective is to make sure that all of your guitar stops moving at the same time when the case is dropped or tossed.
Loosening the string tension is also helpful, but there’s no need to make the strings totally slack. Just tune it down a couple of steps. Packing your guitar in its case in a shipping box doesn’t relieve you of the need to pack the headstock as outlined above, because the same whiplash dangers still apply.
Perhaps the greatest advantage to carefully packing your guitar before flying with it or shipping it is that you’ll sleep easier when it’s in transit.
The pandemic has brought guitarists lots more time to tinker with tone toys. Here’s what players all over the world have been putting together in their bunkers.
Eric B Thomas: The Rack Treatment
Thank you so much for offering your readers an opportunity to share their love for pedalboards. I’d love to share my pedalboard with your readers. It’s got wheels!As both an engineer and songwriter, I’m infatuated with collecting pedals, but also despise the clutter and time spent rearranging and rewiring handfuls of stompboxes and patch cables. My appreciation for the pedal-building art and my stubbornness to move entirely into the digital realm led me to Paul Vnuk Jr.’s “Pedals in the Mix” video, where he showcases his home studio pedal rig in the studio rack format. I spent hours studying his set up, recognized what I could do for myself, experienced debilitating G.A.S, then got to work allocating everything I needed to assemble my own pedalboard rack.
At the core of my setup is a Behringer PX3000 Ultrapatch Pro patchbay. The pedals’ inputs and outputs are all patchable from the front end. This allows for the signal routing to happen as quickly as inspiration may strike. Chorus before or after distortion? But what about the reverb into the fuzz?! No more wasted time playing pedal Tetris and more time making fun noise!
- Channel 1 is a Samson MD1 Passive Direct Box. The balanced output is sent to Pro Tools to be used later for reamping. The thru output returns to the patchbay to use with other pedals.
- Channel 2 runs through a Boss GE-7 equalizer for any necessary tone tweaking.
- Channel 3 holds the EarthQuaker Devices Palisades overdrive. If you’re not familiar with this pedal, just imagine having a whole bunch of differently modified Tube Screamers in one box. I think the value in this pedal’s tweakability is severely underrated!
- Channel 4 is a Pepers’ Pedals Dirty Tree boost. I wasn’t quite ready to shell out $400 to a local seller for a TC preamp, but this box absolutely crushes!
- Channel 5 accesses the EarthQuaker Devices Acapulco Gold. Even if you could afford a Sunn Model T, wouldn’t you just dime it, too? This gets me in the ballpark without interrupting my fiancé’s virtual teaching.
- Channel 6 is home to a pedal that was at the bottom of a “box of junk” that was included with a guitar I purchased off Craigslist: a 1978 Electro-Harmonix Little Big Muff Pi. A quick battery swap took this from “yeah, it just don’t work so you can have it with all that junk” to “holy crap!”
- Channel 7 features the Keeley 4 Knob Compressor, which I love just cranking to get that nearly infinite sustain.
- Channel 8 holds another EarthQuaker Devices pedal. The Sea Machine Super Chorus caught my attention with its six knobs of tweakability, and I honestly haven’t used the same settings twice when writing.
- Channel 9 connects to what I’d say was my first real “boutique” pedal, the Midnight30Music Starry Night Delay Deluxe. Based on a PT2399 chip, this box creates such musical feedback when cranked, and rides the edge of self-oscillation without spinning out of control.
- Channel 10 fires up Hungry Robot’s The Wash delay and reverb pedal. If you’re in need of ambience, this pedal has it in spades.
Skip down to Channels 21-24 to meet the Boss RV-500 and DD-500. I actually use these pedals as effects sends from my mixer. Instead of sending delay and reverb through the amps and speaker cabinets, I just blend in delay or reverb from these units as needed.
On the top of the cabinet lies an example of the “mess” I so desperately wish to forget, but, alas, there shall always be some form of it. The bass signal chain is composed of the Boss TU-3, DOD Meatbox Subsynth, Darkglass Microtubes B7K Analog Bass Preamp, and a Samson MD1 DI.
The final box is the Disaster Area Designs SMARTClock Gen3 Tap Tempo controller. This unit receives MIDI for tempo from a Pro Tools session, passing MIDI down to both Boss 500 units, along with four additional 1/4” outputs to which The Wash and the Starry Night Deluxe will both be connected.
All pedals in the rack are powered by a Truetone 1 Spot Pro CS12 and wired using Redco brand cables with Amphenol 1/4” connectors.
Thanks again for the opportunity to share this pedalboard and I hope others will find my project inspiring or fun!
It’s that time of year, when Premier Guitar readers get the chance to show their pedalboards, and how they use them to create worlds of sound. There’s no wrong way to signal a stomp—the options are virtually endless. Read on to see what players have been cooking up in their COVID guitar bunkers. A few highlights include a completely white-washed mystery pedalboard, a retirement bucket list project from a 62-year-old beginner, an elaborate rackmounted setup made with a goal to streamline pedal-Tetris, and much more. Enjoy!