Outdoor Guitar Survival Guide

Your guitar can feel rock solid indoors, then completely unravel the moment you roll up to an outdoor gig. Heat, humidity, and direct sun push the wood and hardware into fast changes, and that shows up as tuning instability, sticky playability, and sometimes a neck that suddenly needs attention. We walk through what actually helps when the weather is the problem, especially during those brutal hot and humid summer shows where everything feels damp and rushed. 

We share a simple acclimation process that keeps your instrument from getting shocked: leave it in the case, park it in the shade, give it time, then crack the case so the guitar adjusts gradually before soundcheck. From there, we talk through when to put the guitar on a stand, when to retune, and why checking tuning more often outdoors is normal, not a personal failure. If an electric guitar needs a small neck adjustment in extreme humidity, we explain how to plan that ahead of time so you are not scrambling right before you walk onstage. 

We also cover the practical gig-bag items that matter when sweat and moisture take over: towels for wiping the neck, body, and hands, plus optional helpers like Fast Fret for strings and Dry and Glide for your hands when the neck starts feeling like a slip and slide. Finally, we discuss humidity control options for storage, including D’Addario Humidipak Maintain, and why shade and patience beat any quick fix. If you found these outdoor guitar tips useful, subscribe, share this with a gigging friend, and leave a quick review so more players can find it.

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Steve

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Transcript

Why Outdoor Weather Wrecks Guitars

Steve 0:35

Hey, Steve Stein from Guitar Zoom Academy here. And today we're going to be talking about playing in situations where you have to bring your guitar outside and maybe it's really, really cold. Or maybe in my case, you have to play outside and it's really, really hot and humid. So you think about your guitar, whether it's an acoustic or electric, and you think about the fact that you're you usually keep it in a pretty moderate place. You've got a place in your house where the temperature is pretty stable and you try and keep the humidity, you know, somewhere around 45% to 50%-ish, somewhere around there. And um, and then all of a sudden you're gonna take this guitar outside and you're gonna play, and it's 100 degrees outside, and the humidity is really, really, really high. Well, what happens with that guitar? Well, oftentimes that guitar is gonna, it's gonna kind of freak out because it's in a different situation. And so, what are some things that we can do to help that? Again, acoustic or electric. And and you might have to look into some specifics of this, but uh for your own situation. But one thing I would say is you don't want to take necessarily a really, really expensive vintage guitar outside when you have to play and it's extremely cold or extremely hot and humid. Now, let's be honest, most people don't really play outside very often when it's extremely cold. It happens. You know, I played a show not that long ago where we had to play outside and it was in the 50s, um, which is a little cold, certainly cold on the on the hands. Um, it was actually upper 40s now that I think about it, upper 40s, lower 50s,

Choose The Right Guitar For Heat

Steve 2:11

by the time we started playing, and it was cold. But that had more to do with me as a person than it did with the guitar. The guitar was was perfectly fine. What I find is when I have to play outside uh for an event and it's incredibly hot and humid, that's where I run into a lot of problems because in the summertime in the Midwest, that's a that's a pretty common thing. So the first thing is you're not gonna bring a you know $30,000 guitar out to this thing. You're you're gonna bring something, again, if you've never done this before, it's hard to know, but you might have a couple of guitars in your, you know, guitar arsenal that do better in humid and hot situations. Maybe you don't know, maybe you haven't figured that out yet. I'm just saying that's that's something to be aware of. But let's let's go through some of the steps. So you're traveling to this show, and the the guitar is in its case, uh, it's in your car or it's in a trailer or something like that. And of course, in a trailer, it can get get quite hot. But that's that's the reality of things. So you've got it in a case, maybe you've got it in a nice hard shell case, um, you know, or maybe a nice, you know, soft shell case, something like that. And you get to the place where you're gonna be playing. Now, the main thing that I do is I can take the guitar out, I can keep it outside for a while before, you know, because you have to do sound check, you have to do all these kind of things, and you're not gonna keep

Acclimate In The Case And Shade

Steve 3:35

moving in and out all the time. What I like to do is I've got it in the case. I'll put it somewhere outside in the shade. This is very, very important. I don't want to stick it right in the sun and let it bake there. I want to try and keep it in the shade as much as possible. And I've got it in the case. Okay, the case is closed, everything like that. And if I can, I want it to stay in that case for a good half an hour if I can. Um, maybe even longer if I have the capability, but I want it in the shade. The next thing I might do is I might open the case, crack the case just a little bit to start allowing some of that humidity to start coming in. But again, I'm not just opening it. I it it all depends on how much time you have. These are very important things. But I'm gonna open the case uh just a little bit, you know, maybe unlock it or unzip it a little bit, allow it to start acclimating that way again. It's in the shade. Maybe I do that for another 15, 20 minutes or whatever it might be. Again, as best I can. If I need to do a quick sound check, I'm gonna take it out, I'm gonna do the sound check. But then I'm gonna put it back in the case, and I'm gonna, again, you know, at this point I don't need to zip it up. I can keep it unzipped, but I've got it in the case, and and that humidity is acclimating to it. Still in the shade, always in the shade if possible, as much as humanly possible in the shade. And then a little while before I'm gonna actually do the performance, that's when I'm gonna take it out, put it on the guitar stand. And by this time, I'm I'm retuning it. I've got to tune it, I've got to adjust some things. If it's an electric guitar, especially, I may have to actually make some neck adjustments because if it's really hot and it's really humid, that guitar is going, whoa, this is this is not what I'm used to. So you have to be aware of that. You might have to make a couple of little adjustments. You know, you can do that off to the side. You don't have to do that in front of the audience. You could be doing that off to the side, or if you have a tech, you can be doing a little bit of tweaking to that. Um, you know, you want to do that a little while beforehand. You're not doing it five minutes before the show. You've already, you know, it's acclimated. It's been in the case in the shade. You opened it up, let some humidity in, doing its thing. Okay, maybe you did the sound check, you put it back in this case. It's been out there for an hour or whatever it might be. Again, everybody's different. This is how I do it. I can't be running the case back and forth constantly all day between being somewhere inside and then being outside. I'm busy, I have things going on. But I try and keep it in the shade as much as humanly possible. And then at some point it's gonna come out, it's gonna be on the stand in the shade. And here it is. This is getting ready, reality. It's getting ready for the show. And then I'm gonna tune it, adjust the neck, whatever I might I might need to do at that

Soundcheck Without Shock To The Neck

Steve 6:15

point, and deal with the fact that it's it's gonna adjust. Okay, so now it's out, it's on its stand. I've done some adjustments to it. Now it's half an hour before the show or whatever. I can't be running back and forth in front of the audience. I it there it is, it's sitting on the stand, or it's over with me, not on the stand, somewhere else. Okay, and I'm playing it, practicing and warming up and all that stuff and checking things, making sure it's okay, tuning as needed. Now it's time to play. So I walk out, the guitar's as good as it's gonna get at this point. It's been sitting in the case, the case has been opened, it's been sitting on the stand in the shade, all of that kind of stuff, and now it's time to perform. So I go to play, play the first song. Things are what they are. After that first song, if I've got an opportunity, or maybe the first two songs are tied together, after the second song, whatever it is, that's what I'm gonna check my tuning again. And that's the way it is. Okay, I'm gonna do the best I can with it. I'm gonna check my tuning a lot more than I normally would when I'm playing indoors, where everything is normal. I'm gonna have to keep checking that tuning. Acoustic, you have to do this a lot. Make sure that it's ready to go. But I've already been doing that when I was, you know, outside, away from the audience. I've been checking the tuning. I've been readjusting as best I can. So I'm noticing, oh, the first string is just really struggling. Okay, well, I know that now, right? So by the time I get up there and start playing and I need to keep tuning, I'm aware of what the guitar has been doing throughout the day, you see. So some people don't need to deal with this. Some people, you know, they play in a common uh weather situation on a regular basis. When you live in North Dakota, that's not the case. When you live in North Dakota, in January or February, it's 40 below zero. You're not playing outside at that point, but you're you've got your guitar somewhere where there's humidity and all that kind of stuff. You're trying to keep things common. And then all of a sudden, here comes the summer. And the summer, it's 100 degrees outside, and the humidity, you walk outside and you immediately start sweating

Tuning Strategy During The Set

Steve 8:20

because it's so humid. So, what are some other things you can do? Well, making sure that you've got some sort of towel or rag that you can use on the guitar if it gets really wet from the humidity. You want to wipe off the neck, you want to wipe off the body, you want to wipe off your arms, right? Whatever it is that you need to do, you want to have a towel or two available for that kind of thing. The other thing that you can use is because it is very humid, um, you can use like, uh, do I yeah, yeah, I got it right here. There's a couple things that you can do. Now, there's this stuff called fast fret that you can put on your strings that will help to keep them, you know, lubricated, which in the when it's really humid out, that's not really something that I need. Okay. Um, but this is the big one is this stuff called dry and glide. Okay. Now it's like it's like pool chalk, and you can use stuff like that. Okay. Some people use baby powder, different things like this. This dry and glide, what happens is this doesn't go on your guitar. This goes on your hands. So if your hands are really, really humid or your guitar is really, really wet and you keep wiping it off, you can take this dry and glide, shake it up. It's got a rolling ball on there,

Towels And Grip Helpers For Humidity

Steve 9:31

and you can put it on your hands and then work it into your hands to dry out your hands, which helps a little bit on the neck if you're really struggling with it being humid outside. So you've got a towel, you've got some stuff like that that you can use again, whatever it is that you you like to use. Um, that stuff I learned about when I played in Germany, and it was really, really hot and humid outside. And um, it was it was a a great thing for that situation because we'd been playing outside, rehearsing outside all day, and um, and it was just really, really terrible. So that stuff came in handy. So having a towel, rag, whatever it is, to wipe off the guitar, wipe off your hands, things like that, but then to be able to use that. So that's another thing. Now, the last thing I'm gonna mention is DaDario has come out with these guitar cases now that they have these things called Humidipac Maintain. Now, I haven't tried this yet. As you can see, I haven't opened this yet, but I bought this new DaDario case and it and where the uh the neck rests inside the guitar case. You can put these humidipaks inside there. And they claim that not only does it add humidity when it's needed, but it will extract humidity. That's what these things claim to do. I haven't tried them yet. Um, but that's why I got that case and got these, is

Humidipaks And A Safer Outdoor Routine

Steve 10:51

because what a great idea if it would actually work to be able to put it in the case. And then when it's sitting outside and it's trying to get acclimated and I've got the case closed, this thing's trying to extract that that water, that humidity. And then I open it and it's doing the best it can. Again, I don't know how well they work. I haven't tried it yet, but it's what a great idea. At some point, I've got to take the guitar out of the case and I've got to put it on a stand because it's gotta get used to things. But it's a slow process. The goal is not to just get out there and take it out of the case and set it in the sun and hope for the best. That's the worst thing that you can do. So, anyway, hopefully that helps you a little bit and better understanding some things that you can do when you have to play outside and it's really cold, or you have to play outside, especially when it's really hot and humid. When it's cold, it's more about you than it is about the guitar. Although, you know, the guitar can struggle a little bit. You're not playing outside when it's 10 below. That's not happening. But if it's really cold, you know, you've got a jacket on, whatever it might be, you've got your arms covered. Uh, you might have cut off gloves that you're using or something like that. Um, but in my experience, I don't play outside when it's cold near as much as when I play outside when it's really, really hot. So