Use a clean rag to polish the body. The first time you polish your bass, get the hang of it by polishing the back first. Put a little polish on the guitar body, then use the rag to spread it without rubbing it too much in one spot. Go all over the back, front and the back of the neck.

It is not necessary to use a metal polish on the metal parts of your guitar, and you should only use it sparingly if it is really, really necessary. And don’t get it on any of the fingerboard.

Use cotton wool balls on the pickups. No liquid – just the cotton balls to get the dust off. Under no circumstances get polish or liquid of any kind on the pickups.

Putting new strings on and leaving them till they need changing is not good enough. Every time you play your bass give the strings a clean with some alcohol on a rag. Don’t rub the alcohol into the fretboard, just clean each string individually by grabbing it between your fingers with the rag.

Fretless guitars are not a well-known item so not too many music stores keep them in stock.

You can make a fretless guitar from an electric or acoustic guitar but steel strings will be tough on a wooden fretboard.

To make a fretless guitar from a nylon string acoustic, you need to slide the frets out of their grooves. If they are glued in, heat them with a soldering iron or small blowtorch to heat the glue.

Before filling the fret grooves, try playing your new fretless guitar as is. If it plays okay, may as well leave it. If you do fill the grooves, leave the lines visible to serve as markers. Fretless guitars are often sold with fret lines and the dots on the side.

Here is a nice tune that shows what you can do playing fretless:

Giving in to gravity when the body’s center of gravity is too far back will cause a flattening of the lumbar spine (Norris 39). While this is acceptable for many activities -due to the fact that it will require less energy than sitting “up straight” in a poorly designed chair- it is not necessarily advantageous for playing the guitar. Playing the guitar for several hours a day in this position can put a dangerous strain on the back and can also limit one’s capacity to breathe. In the words of Richard Norris, M.D., director of the National Arts Medicine Center, “flattening of the lumbar curve results in flattening of the diaphragm, limiting its excursion and thereby decreasing the air flow” (39). A forward sloping chair will redirect the body’s line of gravity over the sit bones and will not only discourage flattening of the lumbar spine, but it will also allow for fuller breathing as well as decreasing the amount of work that the body must do in order to sit upright, thereby reducing the risk of pain and fatigue.
The Humane Guitarist on holding the acoustic guitar

Here is a video on playing the steel string acoustic when sitting down.

And then there’s the effects that sit on the floor with the pedals and allow you to keep your favorite effects as presets. Here is a video showing you the benefits of the pedal board.

If you have seen people who learn to play the guitar with little or no effort, it becomes obvious from watching them that they are comfortable in their body and they know instinctively how to work with it. The first thing we need to do if we are going to smooth the progress of learning the guitar is learn to watch for unnecessary tension.

It is a little bit of an effort to free up some attention from the usual way we practice but if you start with muscular tension, you will notice that we often torture ourselves when we practice our guitar playing. We make little grunting noises when we make mistakes, we hold our breath, and the muscles in our faces work overtime as our fingers, arms and hands try to learn in the face of crippling tension.

The first tool we have that will help us notice and lessen unnecessary muscular tension is the speed we try to play at. It is a good idea to deliberately play a little slower than our mind and feelings tell us they want to. Our haste to become guitar heroes is driven by the ego, and the ego does not want to cooperate with the body.

“Playing guitar can be painful, particularly if you stay at it for hours at a time. To begin with, we must use our bodies in an asymmetrical way to hold the guitar, resulting in muscle imbalances. In addition, we cave in the front of our bodies as we wrap around the instrument and we usually distort our necks and compress our vertebra as well. We risk injury from repetitive motion and we tend to build tension in our necks, arms and hands with extended practice. Even the most body-conscious players can fall victim to pain and injury at times. With some information and a few exercises these problems can be avoided or solved.”
Charlotte Adams – Pain-Free Guitar Playing

“Excess muscular tension will destroy anything you attempt on the guitar.

It will nullify days, months even years of practice.

It affects every note that you produce on the instrument.

If it remains unchecked, you will practice tension so deep into your playing that it will take a long time to undo. There is also a good chance that tension in your hands, arms etc will damage the body.
http://www.trueguitar.com/articletension.htm”

This video is a quick overview of the GarageBand interface.

With your laptop and GarageBand it will only take a minute or two to set up your computer to record your guitar music. You can add echo or any other effects after recording.

You can edit and overdub with GarageBand. You can also play loops and beats.

With a Windows based computer you can find plenty of free software for recording your music. The most obvious choice is Audacity Audacity is an open-source audio editing platform that’s very easy to use. This video explores how to set-up your preferences and start recording audio.

Here are a few techniques to help you find the elusive rattling in parts of your guitar that are nor supposed to make a noise:

Hit the guitar with your knuckles along the neck and body till the rattling occurs. Any noise that seems to come from the top of the guitar neck is probably coming from a loose machine head part. Check for loose screws, nuts or washers.

Any damage you inflict on your guitar is also unlikely to be covered by the warranty unless you can convince the seller that you were not careless in handling it. Read your warranty carefully if you live in an area where extreme temperatures occur because you might find that cracking due to dryness in the air or damage from extreme cold are excluded.

Basically, your warranty covers poor workmanship on the part of the manufacturer of your guitar. Or if the materials the guitar is made of are substandard. When you but an acoustic guitar that has a pickup built in, you need to be sure that the electronic bits are covered by the guitar’s warranty or if they are covered by their own separate agreement.

Classical guitars were developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries specifically to play classical music on. Flamenco guitars were developed a little earlier than classical guitars to accompany flamenco singers and dancers.

Classical guitars and flamenco guitars are both six string guitars that are fitted with nylon strings. They are both descended from the same line of stringed instruments but they have different sounds and different “actions” – the way they feel when you play them.

The most obvious difference to anybody looking at a classical and a flamenco guitar standing side-by-side is that the flamenco guitar is fitted with a tapping plate, or golpeador. This is a piece of thin plastic stuck to the body of the guitar just below the sound hole. Flamenco guitar music was originally developed as the accompaniment to flamenco singing and dancing and part of that accompaniment consists of the guitarist tapping on the body of the guitar, either between strumming strokes with the index finger of the right hand or in unison with rest strokes with the thumb.

Another difference between classical and flamenco guitars which has been gradually phased out over the past thirty or forty years is the use by flamenco guitar makers of wooden tuning pegs. These pegs are much lighter than the machine heads found on other guitars, which was very helpful for guitar players who held their guitars in the traditional flamenco position which meant the guitar rested on the guitarist’s right thigh and the left hand supported the neck.

The flamenco way of holding the guitar was abandoned in the nineteen sixties and seventies when the “new wave” flamenco guitarists adopted a position where the guitar player sits with legs crossed, with the guitar resting on the left and right thighs.

Classical and flamenco guitars are made of two different types of wood to give each kind of guitar its distinctive sound. Classical guitars have a deep, sonorous tone and are usually made from cedar or spruce and rosewood. Flamenco guitars have a drier, thinner sound and are usually made from spruce and maple or sycamore. In recent decades, though the flamenco guitar players have experimented with a more classical sound.

There are some difficulties when you travel with your guitar. Not all planes have overhead compartments large enough to take a guitar, so carrying it on board might not be practical. If you put it in the luggage you may not see it again. To make sure your guitar is safe on the aircraft you could buy a flight case but the case might be worth more than your guitar.

To start with, do not put your guitar on an aircraft without first de-tuning the strings. If your guitar is subject to any undue shocks or pressure, the pull of the strings on the neck could be the straw that breaks the guitar’s back.

Here is a video giving you the details on various guitar cases.

If you make the decision to trust the baggage compartment with your instrument, then you’d best take care of the most vulnerable point – the top of the neck. It only takes a little pressure to separate an acoustic guitar’s tuning head from the rest of the neck. Use underwear or whatever other small, soft items you have to pack around the tuner area in your case.

Another way of travelling with your guitar is to buy a specially made travel guitar like the Washburn in this video.

Finally, if you want to take your guitar on a trip with you and you can’t bring yourself to trust the baggage handlers and you don’t want to carry it onboard, you could send it by courier a day or two ahead of you. But that’s expensive.