It's well into that time of year again when all over America (and many other countries) people have turned on their heaters and unknowingly may be neglecting their fine instruments.

I was guilty of this myself, before I took up luthiery. I played an inexpensive Alvarez dreadnaught for many years. It was cheap and it played all right and I wasn't really good enough to buy a "real guitar" so I kept banging away on my plywood wonder.

Then fortune smiled on me and bestowed a little unexpected cash in my bank account. I had just talked myself into upgrading my instruments, not because my considerable talent was outplaying the instruments I owned (I still don't have that problem, probably never will!) I just figured that I had been playing music for a good portion of my life and would continue to do so for the remainder of my life so it wasn't a crime to purchase a Martin guitar, or a Gibson Banjo or Mandolin.

I started searching around for my new instrument collection and one of the purchases I made was a nice 1976 Martin D-28, which I carefully drove home through the snow and promptly began playing the same stale licks I exercised on my Alvarez. It felt wonderful. I propped my new acquisition on the stand and would look at it as much as I would play it.

And then a funny thing happened. About a week after I brought the instrument home it started to buzz. I pulled out my plywood wonder and it still played like it always did. But my new expensive Martin buzzed. I was heartbroken.

How could my expensive guitar sound so awful and my cheapo guitar sound okay? The answer was humidity. It was wintertime and I lived in a small, attic apartment in Wrigleyville, Chicago. The heating was inadequate and uneven, the sole source of the heat being a giant space heater nailed to a wall.

On a good night the living room was so hot and dry it felt like the Sahara while the bedroom was so cold and dry it felt like a winter night in Montana. I would usually wake at least twice in the night and have to rehydrate because the room was so dry.

On a bad night it was worse. It never even occurred to me what this might do to my solid-wood guitar. I drove over to the store where I had purchased the instrument and asked the owner why my guitar sounded so bad. He explained that in the wintertime instruments will dry out; the top sinks and the strings get closer to the fret board causing the strings to buzz.

He suggested I get a winter saddle and a summer saddle and he quickly made a winter saddle for me at no extra charge. He failed to give me the humidity lecture. I subsequently moved from Chicago to Montana, Wisconsin, Denver, Tucson and back without any problem. I was lucky. The only thing that happened to that guitar was a buzz.

Now I am going to tell you what I tell countless of sad visages who grace my shop window asking why his or her instrument buzzes, or why a mysterious crack has appeared in the instrument, or why the sides of an instrument neck are so rough.

When asked if they humidify their instruments, the answer is almost always either, "No" or "I have a house humidifier." But, a house humidifier is not enough unless yours is able to adequately keep your house between 45 to 60 percent humidity. In the wintertime, you must humidify your instruments if you live in an area where you have the heat on.

Good quality instruments are made of solid woods. Solid woods shrink or expand depending on the moisture content in the air. While the basic size of the instrument does not change that perceptibly, the wood changes and this will cause cracks to develop in the tops and backs of instruments.

There are several ways to tell if your instrument is drying out before the cracks appear.

In many instances as I wrap my hand around the neck of an instrument, I can feel the fret edges sticking out from the neck causing the neck to feel rough or sharp. This is one of the first signs of an instrument that is under humidified.

Unfortunately, some stores do not adequately humidify their acoustic rooms and people do purchase instruments that are already dried out. In the case of the shrunken neck, rehumidifying the instrument will not fix this problem. The sides of the frets need to be filed flush again by a qualified luthier. This is not overly time consuming and in our shop the fee is about 20 dollars.

Another sign that an instrument is underhumidified is when the action height drops. As mentioned before, the top of the instrument will shrink as the humidity leaves an instrument, causing the bridge to rest lower than normal in relation to the fret board.

If your once booming mando is starting to get fret buzz it may be time to bring it to the shop to have the neck adjusted and the top checked. Typically when instruments dry out their necks warp a bit causing relief to appear in the neck. Relief is when the middle of the neck falls away from the strings.

If your mandolin has a working adjustable truss rod, your friendly neighborhood luthier should be able to tighten the rod for you and remedy the problem.

Of course, once the humidity begins to rise again in the springtime, you may find your mandolin buzzing in the first five frets. The humidity will cause some mandolin necks to back-bow where the neck curves toward the strings in the center of the neck. That same friendly luthier should be able to reverse the process with that another rod adjustment.

If your instrument does crack, is it time to buy a new instrument? No. In many cases, depending on the crack and how long the instrument has been dry, the instrument can be rehydrated and the cracks close up again.

If necessary, small cleats can be glued across the crack on the inside of the instrument to strengthen the wood. The crack may or may not be visible when the repair is done.

In a bad case--let's say, perhaps, you were out of the country for a couple of years and stored your expensive mando in somebody's attic for safe keeping and the cracks are just far too wide to be pulled back together, then a splint can be added to fill the crack.

The easiest way to "fix" these instruments is to take care of them adequately in the first place. In order to insure that your instrument is adequately humidified you want to keep the relative humidity in the space around your instrument between 45 to 50 percent with a temperature around 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

According to Webster's dictionary, relative humidity is "The ratio of the amount of water vapor actually present in the air to the greatest amount possible at the same temperature." For this reason it is important to watch both the temperature and the humidity. There is some debate on the merits of inexpensive hygrometers.

Some people say they are great, some say they do more harm than good. I fall on the positive side of these little wonders. To check to see what the relative humidity is in the area you keep your instruments, you can pick up an inexpensive humidity and temperature gauge for somewhere around 30 dollars at Radio Shack. These are small enough to mount on a wall in your music room or even slip into your instrument's case, depending on how much other paraphernalia you carry with you.

In the wintertime the instrument will be protected better if you case it, but you have to make sure the climate in the case is right as well. To check the relative humidity of the area make sure the gauge is within close proximity of the instrument and look at the gauge each day for a week.

The average should fall within the specs listed above. If your instrument needs to be humidified, there are a couple of different ways to do this. The least expensive way is to purchase a Dampit humidifier (about 12 dollars) which basically consists of a small hose with holes poked in it. Inside the hose is a sponge that you will need to rewet every day. The Dampit is then slid through the sound hole or f-hole of your mandolin and the instrument is put back in its case.

It is very important that you make sure to squeeze the Dampit so all excess water is removed from the object. You want the sponge to be moist but not dripping. If the sponge is dripping water may run from the Dampit and settle inside the instrument causing water damage. Where the water settles depends on how you store your case. Regardless, this is a bad scenario and will do damage to the instrument.

Another form of humidifier is sold by Clayton, I believe, and it consists of what looks like an old plastic film canister with holes poked in the top and clay inside of it. You wet the clay and close up the plastic container. This humidifier is then stored in the instrument case, more than likely up around the headstock.

If you want to spend more money, there are adequate room humidifiers. I recently purchased a humidifier for approximately 150 dollars made by Beamis. The humidifier can put out 12 gallons of water per day and is made to humidify up to 2500 square feet. My apartment is pretty small so this is more than adequate to keep the entire place within those limits.

Because each part of the country is different, you should stop in at your local folk shop and see what they have to say concerning humidifying your instrument.

At Guitar Works we have a sheet the owner wrote up many moons ago, of which we make numerous copies of at the beginning of the winter and shove into everybody's hand who is buying an instrument or has brought a dry instrument in to be repaired.

Your local shop may have its version of a handout as well, not to mention instrument humidifiers. The small price of an instrument humidifier and the effort of making checking the humidifier part of your daily routine will pay off in the end.

Complete list of Mandolin Magazine articles by and about Frank Hamilton from the back issues database.

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