Why does an unplayed guitar go out of tune?
There’s nothing quite like a well-loved guitar. The one that you know better than your childhood home, whose sound you instinctively think of when you put chord sequences together in your head, who started this whole “playing music” phase countless years ago.
Of course, sitting down with it for ten minutes causes it to slide out of tune these days, so you’ve been spending more time with actually reliable axes, trying not to feel too guilty about it because these are inanimate bits of wood and metal we’re talking about.
However, those more reliable six-strings are there for a reason. After all, your old faithful falls out of tune when you play it…and when you don’t, it seems? How could this be? It makes sense that actually playing the thing stretches the strings and makes them fall out of whack. It’s never really recovered from that Sonic Youth phase you had when you were 20. These days, though, it’s falling out of tune just because you have it propped up against your bedroom wall for days at a time.
Well, the good news is that this may not be because the guitar is totally washed. The truth is that unless you keep your guitars in a completely climate-controlled environment, leaving them out in the open will mess with any guitar’s tuning, whether they’re a top-of-the-range Gibson or a Strat copy you found in a skip. The key is finding out how much of your axe is made of wood, because while that’s the ideal material for any guitar to be built from, it also leaves them pretty vulnerable to interference.
How does a guitar lose its tuning?
This may sound like a strange thing to say in a vacuum. It’s a guitar; surely the whole thing will be made of wood apart from the strings? Ideally, yes, but several solid-body electric guitars, especially if they’re on the cheaper side, will contain plastic or laminate. Ironically enough, what these sacrifice in resonance and sound quality, they actually make up for in durability, but chances are the headstock will be carved from wood, so it’s still worth reading on.
You see, wood is a temperamental material. It’s constantly reacting to the air around it, most notably the humidity. If there’s more water vapour in the air around the wood, the porous material will absorb it, causing the wood to expand very slightly. If there’s less, it’ll shrink very slightly. This won’t be noticeable to the naked eye, but it doesn’t have to be to wreak havoc on your guitars.
After all, the way it stays in tune is by having the strings stretched at a very specific length, down to the millimetre. The moment that any part of that guitar distorts, that equilibrium is disturbed, and it falls out of tune. The more this happens, the more the guitar becomes susceptible to it, and suddenly, you’ve got an axe that won’t stay in tune for love nor money.
So, if you’re a consummate collector and want your guitars to stay in tune, a good case will be the best place to start. Or perhaps that struggle against your guitar’s machine heads is precisely the reason you like it. If that’s the case, hi Jack White, we’re all huge fans!
