Getting ready for my return to playing live, I realise I need to spend a bit of time giving my gigging guitars some love. Now, it’s not like I’m Dallas Schoo and I’ve got The Edge on the phone saying he needs his 20-something gigging guitars all restrung and in tip-top condition before five o’clock. Nope, I’ve just got the two: one for the main stuff, the other for slide. Simple.
That said, I’m a bit embarrassed when I pull out my slide guitar, which I haven’t used since October 2020. Do strings corrode and fingerboards get gunkier just from a guitar being in a gigbag? Or did I forget to give it a wipe down after its last hurrah? My main guitar, a start-up ultrabasic-spec Knaggs Kenai, has had plenty of use over these past pandemic months as a reference for any relevant review I’m writing. And before that it had been a workhorse for a couple of years before gigs stopped. A bit of a clean-up, then, some new strings and I’ll be done.