CLEAN MACHINE
A clean instrument is more likely to play well and remain fault-free. It’ll look and feel great, too. Matt Gleeson describes his preferred cleaning regime for guitars
“If the finish is grubby then I’ll use something like a lighter fluid.You’ll hear about it on YouTube and other places, where they’ll call it‘naphtha’, but it’s basically the same thing. That gets rid of the gunge, but it doesn’t do a good job of polishing the finish.There are loads of good polishes on the market, but here we use something called Muc-Off, which is [a range of products for bicycles, motorcycles and cars]. I stumbled across the bike polish when the workshop was in my garage. It works on everything.
“Don’t use any abrasives like T-Cut to deal with scratches and blemishes unless you know what you’re doing. If you’ve got little scratches and chips, I would just tend to leave them because nine times out of 10, unless you’re going to be refinishing the guitar, you’re just going to make it look worse. So just keep things nice and simple.
“When it gets to rosewood fingerboards, our cleaning regime is lighter fluid applied with an old toothbrush so you can get right underneath each fret and get all the gunk out of there.The naphtha will dry out the wood, so you need to moisturise it.We have various oils for that. Lemon oil itself is a type of mineral oil [containing little or no real lemon oil] and I find it’s a better cleaner than it is a moisturiser. So I’ve developed a wax here – called Monty’s Instrument Food – that we use. Before I had that, I was using a joiner’s finishing wax.That gave great results, too, but it stank! A suitable wax will moisturise everything and seal it in, too, so your ’boards will look a lot better and will stay that way for a lot longer than if you just use a standard oil.
“I know some people who really like olive oil and all that kind of stuff on their ’board. All of that will work, you just don’t want to put too much on.We did have one guy who put some kind of pure lemon essence rather than lemon oil on his fretboard, which then ate into the wood. It wasn’t exactly the nicest stuff, so don’t do that! But most oils or waxes will be fine for that kind of thing.”