Should You Store A Guitar In A Case Or On A Stand?

Quiz time: Does a book get dusty when you leave it on a shelf? Does skin get leathery and ultimately ruined if you sit in the sun all the time? Does heat and humidity make wood swell and doors stick? Even if the answer to only one of these questions was "yes," then your mission is clear: Stow your guitar in a case when you're not playing it. Don't leave it out on a stand.

Guitars are fragile things, no matter how much effort it took the likes of Pete Townshend and Kurt Cobain to maraud and splinter their instruments on stage. Their guitars were solid-body electrics, though, not the much more delicate hollow-body acoustics. And besides, we're talking about wear and tear over time — the slow decay that eats away at everything. Leaving a guitar on a stand and not stored in a case means exposing it to all of the factors we mentioned above, chiefly heat, light, humidity, and dust.

If you care at all about music, your instrument, the money you paid for it, and basically anything besides treating your guitar like a conversation set-piece in the corner that's supposed to make you look cool rather than service your love of art, then you'll not only slip your guitar in a case when you're not using it, you'll go through all the maintenance necessary to prolong its life. This way, even an often-played, cheap acoustic can last up to 10 years, and a well-made acoustic can last for centuries.

Cases are not just the best way to preserve a guitar, but the only way. Light, heat, and humidity can not only warp, crack, and damage the body, fretboard, headstock, etc., but are so lethal (and difficult/costly to fix) that you even have to watch out for them when your guitar is in a case. Humidity needs to be middle-of-the-line, neither rainforest nor desert (45% to 55%, actually), and temperature around the mid-70s Fahrenheit. 

Then there's proper maintenance. This means detuning your strings if you're not going to play them, which releases the roughly 180 pounds of relentless tension on the neck. It means wiping down the guitar with a guitar-only cloth and guitar-only cleaning products to eliminate another great destroyer of wood: skin oil. It means changing the strings regularly, as they also soak up plenty of dirt and oil, too. Do all this, and your guitar might not last as long as the 17th- and 18th-century guitars stored in perfect conditions in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but it might still outlive you. Even cheap guitars deserve to make beautiful music, like Elvis' first childhood $6.95 guitar that changed music forever.    

Also, accidents can happen if your guitar is on a stand. Have you ever heard of pets and children? Pets with hair and dandruff and children with greasy, grabby hands? Right. So, leave the stands to musicians who are in rehearsal or in the studio and who need to put their instruments down for a second to grab a drink, go to the bathroom, pick their nose, etc. Let's just hope they wipe down their precious guitars, too.