BEST WAYS To Humidify An Acoustic Guitar

Now, if you do not properly humidify your guitar, you could cause serious damage to it. You could crack it. You could have frets pop out. I've actually had that happen to a guitar mine that I didn't take care of. And the frets actually did pop out of it because it got so dry. That wood, you know, when it expands and contracts, when it's dry versus humid. So what can you do if you live in a dried, arid area to protect your guitars from going to talk about that in this video right here.

So my private community, one of my students is like, Lauren, what do you do to humidify your guitars? And ideally, you know, my common guitars, the one I play all the time, like my Gretsch here, I have my tailor right here in a stand next to me. Those. Those guitars are out and about. I don't usually keep them in a case. Some of the best ways to humidify, and I'm going to show you some products you can buy, is to keep your guitar in the case with some sort of. That adds humidity to the case. Now, an ideal humidity for your guitar is 45 to 55%. Now, in New England right now, it's the middle of winter here in the Boston area, and the humidity outside is Maybe in the 20s. I don't know. It's very, very hard for me to get humidity here above 30% in my office. All right. And I don't have the money to build a humidity room. Okay. You could. There's a few different things you can do. All right. If you're in a room like this or you have a small office for your guitars, you could always buy humidifier. Okay. And keep a humidifier running. It throws moisture into the air. That's a great way to add humidity. If you have your guitars out and about and they're not in the case like me, what I like to do is I will bring my guitar in the stand so you can say hi by Taylor. It's in its stand right here. And I will take the guitar into the kitchen with me because, Lauren, why are you bringing your guitar into the kitchen? I will oftentimes if I'm cooking or I'm doing something, I work a lot in my kitchen now that it's been completely renovated. Yay. So excited. I will put a pot on the stove, and I will heat that pot up. So I will boil water, and it will throw off humidity. Now, I often have a tool like this. So this is a sound hole humidifier. This one's called the human tar one. This One's by Music Nomad. I'll put affiliate links to all of these products below. You guys can check out which one works best for you. Now, this comes. You see, it has a little sponge. So what you do is you moisten this sponge and you can put it inside the sound hole. Okay. So this has little holes in it, and you have to keep wetting the sponge. But what I really like about these things is there is a display here. So let me. I'm going to pull this off. So this little tool goes inside your sound hole. So if I grab my tailor so I have my Taylor guitar, what I would do is I would take this blue piece and I would push it in between the strings. And you can see it just sits in there. And then it's going to register the temperature for the guitar as well as the humidity level inside the sound hole. Because that's the most important part. You want to get the humidity in inside the sound hole because it needs to be humid inside your guitar as well. So this is a great thing to have because you can actually measure the humidity for your guitar. These aren't that expensive. And it's a great way to just get some humidity inside the guitar. So what I'll do is I'll have this inside my tailor. I'll turn it on, I'll put it back in my stand, and I will start boiling some water, and I'll come over and I'll check the humidity in the guitar. And it's relatively easy for me to get the humidity up pretty quickly when I start boiling that water. Another option, if you're someone like me who leaves their guitars out in the open a lot, is to take the guitar into the shower with you, believe it or not. Yep. You, obviously, you throw off a lot of humidity when you're showering. All right. We're not leaving it in there for hours, so don't worry. If you're like me, you take a shower, it's 15 minutes, you're in with the guitar. It'll absorb some of that humidity. You get it right back out. So those are a couple things that I do a lot for my guitars when they're out of the case. Now, this is my first guitar, and what, you know, this thing's over 20 something years old. I don't take care of it that well. It's a very cheap guitar when I first got it. But this fretboard is. Is pretty dried out. And if I didn't take care of this, eventually the frets might pop out. But you can see up here. I don't know if you can see it. It's very, very dry. It's a very light colored versus a darker color down here. So this guitar would need some emergency hydration. So for a guitar like that that's suffering from really low humidity, I would lock it in the guitar case with probably this Huminer one. And there's another great product I'm going to show you. These are the cheaper versions, all right. These are the cheaper options. You could also get a couple of these little guitar humidifiers. I think these cost like five bucks. Herco. It's a piece of clay on the inside. Okay. And what you do is you wet the clay and then you shut the COVID and you put it in the guitar case. You can get. I would recommend getting two. I would get one for the body part of the guitar and one for the headstock. Because what happens when you have a guitar case usually in the middle, they have that little pouch that, you know, you can keep your tuner in and some other accessories inside. So it separates the top part of the guitar case from the bottom part of the guitar case. So makes it harder for humidity from that big body part of the case to get up to your headstock. So I would get two of these or get one of these for the headst. Have this one inside the body of the guitar. So those are some great options. Now, the mother of all options, and this is what my guitar tech at Sweetwater recommended to me are the d' Addario humidipaks. They're a little bit more expensive, but I've talked to lots of people, and they say, bar none, if you have a guitar that is dried out or guitar that needs help staying in humidity while it's in a case, these are the way to go. So there's two options you can buy here. They have an emergency care package. All right. This is for, you know, guitars that are really, really dried out. And you need to get some humidity in there. So there's a little pouch. So this emergency kit comes with a couple pouches. This one's going to go in the headstock area. And this is the saddle pouch. You can see it kind of goes like this. That's going to work very much like that other instrument I showed you. This is going to go inside the guitar, over the strings, the third and fourth strings, and it's going to hang inside the sound hole. And this comes with three, three packs. So you get two for the sound hole, one for the headstock. So it says here, the Humidipack restore packs allow you to safely return your instrument and case that have previously not been humidified or are in a known dry condition to the ideal humidity level without the danger of over humidification. So you can over humidify a guitar. Probably not going to happen here in the New England area because it's so dry, but. But it can happen. So you put these in and you would just monitor the humidity with that, you know, that nomad instrument that I showed you earlier. And then you would remove the packs when you get it up to the humidity level that you desire, and then you would switch it out for their maintenance packs. So this is the maintenance pack. This is the regular humidipack two way humidification system. This is for everyday care, okay? And it's the same thing. It comes with a sound hole pouch and it has three maintenance packs in here as well. So once again, it works exactly the same way. You would put the pouch into the headstock. You would also have the saddle pouch that goes inside to maintain the humidity on your guitar. So like I said, these are more expensive methods than, you know, the clay or even the little saddle piece that I showed you earlier with the reader, but they work so much better. I tried using the clay ones when I got my tailor. I used the clay ones. I use the Nomad. And you know, unless the guitar is in the case, it was hard for me to really, really maintain that humidity when it's so dry here in New England. But the humidipacks work really, really well. You will probably have to replace them multiple times through a winter. So don't think just one one of these is going to get you through the winter. You might have to buy two or three, especially if it's very dry. You might have to replace one every one or two months to maintain that humidity level. But if you're like me and you like the best of the best, this is the way to go. Like I said, this is what my Sweetwater rep recommended to me when I got my tailor. Now, if you want to learn more about maintaining your guitar and what happens if your fretboard is dried out or what can we do to condition the fretboard? Well, go check out my acoustic guitar string change video over there where I'm going to show you some of the products I use to maintain my guitar and get moisture back into the fretboard when I change my strings.