Interviews & Editorials

Emily Writes About Disinfecting Your Gear

Emily’s newest article in She Shreds addresses a concern she’s seen recently: how to disinfect your guitar. 

Of course, Emily can’t guarantee you can kill the coronavirus or destroy any germs on your guitar, but she did take a look at common disinfecting methods and talked to luthier Nicole Alosinac about how these different cleaning methods could affect your guitar. 

Read an excerpt below and click here to read the full article

Isopropyl alcohol that’s above 70% can kill COVID-19, according to reports—but it doesn’t always play nice with your instrument. Alosinac uses isopropyl alcohol at times, but only on the strings and unfinished fretboards (e.g., rosewood or ebony): “You can wipe down the strings and a rosewood fingerboard with alcohol, but I wouldn’t wipe down the body or back of the neck with alcohol… Typically, if there’s gunk on the fretboard, I’ll get it off with rubbing alcohol. I’ll put it on a shop towel and wipe it just on the fingerboard itself, sometimes scrubbing with an abrasive brush. This is only if it doesn’t have a maple neck. If it’s rosewood or ebony and the grain is open, you can clean it like that.” 

But what about the drying properties of isopropyl alcohol? Alosinac isn’t concerned: “[After you clean the neck] you can polish the frets and go over the wood with some lemon oil so it doesn’t dry out.”

If your guitar or bass is finished top to bottom with thick poly (think those hard, plastic-esque finishes), isopropyl alcohol is probably safe to use, but could still leave a mess. “It’s not going to damage a poly finish, but it can leave white streaks behind,” says Alosinac. “Those [streaks] will polish off, but I don’t think it’s worth it.” Test it on a small part of your guitar body (under the pickguard) and neck first to make sure there isn’t an unwanted reaction.