Clean Up – The Best Guitar Cleaner & Guitar Polish Options

You need to get hold of the best guitar polish and best guitar cleaner products if you want to give your guitar a little TLC - there's no point cutting corners as you'll just damage your guitar.

However, there is a massive range of guitar cleaning kits and essential guitar care kits out there, so you really need to know exactly what you need and more importantly WHY you need it before you go ahead and purchase a bunch of stuff you may or may not use.

So today, we’re going to discuss some of the best guitar polish options, why you need it, why you need lemon oil and fretboard cleaner and how a guitar cleaning kit can really bring your guitar back to life!

If you want to find out HOW to clean your guitar, read our handy guide, but first here’s a few tips.

When we play our guitar we transfer sweat and oil from our skin to the wood on our guitar or bass. Our skin and sweat is really bad for our guitar as it eventually starts to destroy the protective lacquer and eventually work its way into the wood, breaking it down. It happens slowly, but it does happen!

You’ve seen those old, vintage guitars covered in dirt right? Chances are they could look and play LOT better if they were looked after a bit better! Cleaning your guitar is essential. But it comes down to more than just making it look “pretty” or for aesthetics.

Cleaning your guitar helps maintain a solid working instrument and even helps protect the wood from filling up with gunk and hardware functioning correctly.

Sweat and dirt such as dust can get into the pores of the wood and start to reduce the quality of the tonewood, it can also get into the electronics of your instrument, messing about with the pickups and inner workings.

That's not good. In addition, the hardware can start to rust and cease to operate correctly if left covered in dirt – so it’s best to protect your investment!

Again, we’ve covered how to clean your guitar and bass in another blog, but we’ll explain the main things you need here. You will need the following products:

• Microfibre or lint-free cloth
• Guitar polish/cleaner
• Lemon oil (depending on the neck of your guitar)
• String cleaner

• A complete guitar cleaning kit / guitar cleaning wipes

Ok why? You need the microfibre cloth or lint free cloth to clean your guitar. You need lint free because any other cloth will leave behind little pieces of cloth on your guitar and within the imperfections and cracks (if any) in the finish.

Tissue or dish cloths are the worst possible option as they’ll leave lint on your guitar and basically start to clog your guitar up with bits.

You need specialised guitar polish or guitar cleaner as it doesn’t contain any harmful chemicals that will destroy or harm your finish or start to break down the tonewood. You can’t use regular furniture polish on guitars as they contain things like ammonia, abrasives and alcohol – all of which will damage your guitar.

Specialised guitar polish removes any of these chemicals and utilises specialised ingredients that will help remove dirt and protect your guitar from the elements. 

Lemon Oil helps preserve and condition your fretboard. The fretboard is the most used part of your guitar, so you need to protect it. Lemon Oil protects your fretboard by conditioning the wood and helping to keep it hydrated so it doesn’t dry out and crack.

It also helps to minimise the transition of gunk and acid from your skin to the fretboard. 

Guitar string cleaner is an optional maintenance product that is great for those who like the feel of ‘played in’ strings. This helps clean and rejuvenate strings as well as your fretboard. Some guitarists will simply change strings as soon as they start to feel a little played in, sound a little flat or become dirty from gunk from your hands. However, this stuff helps keep your strings in good working order for longer. 

Guitar cleaning kits have all these things rolled into one convenient package.

So, if you want to just clean your guitar once a month or so, then these are perfect. Some contain a selection of wipes that encompass polish for your guitar, string wipes and wipes to clean your guitar fretboard. Others have everything you need in one package.

Here’s a range of our favourite guitar cleaners and guitar polish that will keep your guitar in good working order and help protect the finish and tonewood. These are ideally applied via a microfibre cloth and we recommend the following:

• BOSS BDC-01 Microfibre Cloth
• Planet Waves Untreated Polish Cloth
• Platinum 65 Suede Microfiber Cloth
• Dunlop 5400 Polish Cloth
• Planet Waves Micro-Fiber Polish Cloth
• Dunlop 5430 Guitar Cleaning Cloth

We’ve discussed what type of guitar necks and tonewoods benefit from Lemon Oil in our guitar cleaning blog, but the basic idea is that only darker tonewoods need Lemon Oil. If you have a Maple or lacquered fretboard – don’t use any.

If you can’t be bothered getting all the different ingredients separately then there are a few amazing guitar cleaning kits available that’ll do the job quickly.

These are some of the best guitar cleaning kits that we recommend for people who need something to clean and protect their guitar.

Shop a full range of guitar polish, cleaners and guitar cleaning kits over at PMT Online, or call into your local PMT store to pick up a full range of guitar accessories. 

Updated: 22/12/2021