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rombsix -> RE: a couple of newbie questions (May 17 2010 2:28:20)
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quote:
Don´t worry about the humidity in the air. If you are not living in the amazonas, you wont get any problems.
Doit: I own a Hohner-HC06 classical guitar which I bought about 8 years ago for 80 US dollars. It's a reliable, acceptable instrument, which I still use to this day. I was in Michigan about 2 months ago, and I decided to take my guitar with me. I live in Beirut, Lebanon, right by the sea side (Mediterranean). The humidity levels here in Beirut are much higher than those in Michigan. I went to Michigan and took the guitar with me, and took the great care that I usually do of it - keeping it in the case anytime I wasn't using it, making sure not to hang clothes on it or drop it in a lake, loosening the strings if I were NOT to use it for a long time, etc. After staying in Michigan for 2 weeks, I took out my guitar one day to play it (I had been using it everyday nearly when I was in Michigan), and I noticed excess buzzing around the eleventh fret on the D string. I said to myself that it was probably the string going bad, or something not significant. I played it, finished, and returned it to its case. Two days later, I took it out again and played it: to my surprise, now the basses all sounded dreadful with buzzing mostly around the eleventh fret. I didn't know what was happening. I had a couple of music major students living where I was over there, who played violins or cellos. I asked them what they thought the problem was, and the first reply I got was: Don't you have a humidifier? I said that I didn't, and that I've been playing for 8 years and never needed one, even though I've taken my guitar to other countries for more than a month's time, and never had any problems. They replied that it is VERY dry in Michigan, and it's a warm dry air because of the heating (I was there in March, and it was about -5 Celsius to +5 Celsius). They told me that even keeping the guitar in the case will NOT solve this problem, and that you need to get a humidifier STAT because the neck probably warped. I said I'm going to give it a couple of days to see what happens: it got WORSE! Now, the notes from the seventh to the eleventh fret on ALL the strings were buzzing. Some notes could no longer be played because fretting them, and not fretting them would not make a difference (the note AFTER that fret's note would sound instead - some string contact problem due to the angle of the neck changing). That is when I started using water-soaked tissues and keeping them in the guitar. Amazingly, about a week after, I noticed an improvement. And now, after having gone back to Beirut, I've been keeping my guitar out of the case over night to let it soak up some of the humidity, and it got much better. However, the D string's eleventh fret was still buzzing annoyingly, so I had to change the saddle to raise the action, and now it's back to normal, but difficult to play because of the higher action.
So the moral of the story is: I used to think that the humidity issue was just a marketing gimmick, or something that doesn't happen unless you drop your guitar in a lake, or nearly burn it. Now I've realized that it's better to be safe than sorry.
Just my 2 cents... [8D]
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