My Recommended Guitar Maintenance Kit

Here's a quick rundown of essential tools you need for doing guitar maintenance and set ups. Can you find it all in one place? Yes you can!

MY RECOMMENDED GUITAR MAINTENANCE AND SETUP KIT
Bryan Clark

Hi everyone, I’m going to be talking about maintaining your guitars - acoustic or electric and a recommended tool kit that I use to that.

Also, if you get into restoring or taking care of your client's guitars, either as a tech or as a studio engineer, and if they're not able to do it themselves (or have the tools with them), it's good for you to be able to have some tools at your disposal, so you'll be able to get the guitar in tip top playing shape.

There's a lot of different types of tools you can buy to clean guitars and to do different types

of light maintenance on them. One that I recommend that I use is the D'Addario maintenance kit.

It's a nice little binder. It fits in a backpack or a gig bag. But if you open it up, what you'll find in there is a handful of tools that are very, very useful.

If you don't have a cloth surface and you're on a hard surface, you've got a soft pad with grippy material on the back, so you can put this down, and rest the body of the guitar on it.

Then, if you pull out your next support tool, you can open it up, pull the back out and then it's ready to support the guitar and at that point, you've got a nice, safe plane to work on the guitar with.

They also have a lot of other really cool, little useful items in here, a multi tool with different Allen wrench gauges and some screwdrivers as well some flats and flathead and Phillips,

which is nice. They have a combo string cutter and winder. Which is great. It can also pull out stubborn bridge pins as well.

They’ve also included a capo. And you might think, why would they ever want to put a capo in with a guitar maintenance? But this is really important when measuring strings action and adjusting string heights on guitars because generally you're going to capo at the first fret and then measure your distances at the 12th fret, so this can be helpful. Plus, it can also be helpful if you're a guitar player who just forgets his capo and needs one in a pinch.

They also give you a little bit of a lube kit, which is for being able to put a little bit of lubrication

in the slots on the nut to make sure that the strings don't catch. If any of you have ever spent a lot of time tuning guitars,

You inevitably get to that spot where you tune a string and it doesn't really move a lot. And then all of a sudden you'll hear a little “zing”. And that's usually because the tension inside the nut slot itself, the windings of the string are actually catching on that. It's really dry in there, so it ends up just becoming lodged because of the tension on the string. So this will help minimize that, which is very welcome.

They also have a multi-guage, multi measuring tool, in this kit. This is a really helpful tool as well to be able to check your action height and make sure that you have even playability on the strings, no matter what the instrument. It could be acoustic, electric, or bass.

Anything that you need to have set up. This is a nice little tool for that. So that's included in this kit.

And one other thing that's kind of cool. It's pretty subtle. But within the kit itself, there's a magnetized strip right here.

So if you have to pull off any screws like maybe it's a truss rod cover or pick guard screws, or screw-washers to get underneath and clean out the pots, etc. You can put the screws right here and they'll just stay put so they won't disappear! That's a nice little addition.

Anyway, I like this D'Addario Multi Tool Maintenance Kit, and I would suggest getting something like this for yourself if you're going to be doing any type of regular maintenance on any type of guitar.