Should You Loosen the Strings When Shipping or Storing a Guitar?

Short answer: drop the tension part-way for shipping — about a whole step down — and leave it alone for normal storage. Don't go completely slack, and don't ship at full pitch either. That's the position I've settled on, and I'll tell you exactly why, including the parts where reasonable people disagree with me.

This question comes up constantly, and the reason it never gets settled is that both camps are arguing from real experience. It isn't a case of one side knowing something the other doesn't.

The two camps, stated fairly

Leave them tuned. The argument is that a neck under string tension is a system in equilibrium. The truss rod is pulling back against roughly a hundred-odd pounds of string pull, and if you remove the strings you leave the rod pulling against nothing. Builders including John Suhr have said not to slacken for shipping, and Larrivée's own owner's manual tells you never to detune when shipping. There's also the obvious point that every guitar that ships from a factory to a dealer arrives tuned to pitch.

Slacken them. The counter-argument is about impact, not equilibrium. Frank Ford, Bryan Kimsey and others who've shipped and received instruments in real volume land on the other side: reduce the tension so that if the box takes a hard hit, there's less stored energy loading the weakest part of the instrument.

Both of those are honest positions held by people who know more than most. Where I come down is that they're answering slightly different questions — one is about slow, steady load, the other is about a sudden one.

What actually breaks, and where

Almost nothing fails in the middle of a neck. The failure point on a set-neck guitar is the transition behind the nut, where an angled headstock is cut back from the neck shaft.

Diagram: why the same drop does very different things to two headstock designs.

That angled area is short grain. The wood fibres run across the joint rather than along it, so there's very little holding the headstock on except the integrity of the timber itself. Gibson knows this better than anyone — they settled on a 17-degree headstock pitch by the late 1920s, dropped it to 14 degrees in 1965 and added a volute specifically to reduce breakages, then went back to 17 degrees without the volute in the mid-to-late 70s. Those changes weren't tonal. They were structural.

A Gibson Les Paul headstock from one of our listings. The area just behind the nut is the whole ballgame.

A flat, in-line headstock doesn't have that problem. The grain runs continuously from neck to headstock tip. And on a bolt-on, if something truly violent happens, the neck can tear out of the pocket — expensive and annoying, but usually repairable in a way that a snapped headstock isn't.

The bolt-on joint on a Fender Strat from stock. Four screws and a plate — mechanically a completely different proposition to a glued-in angled neck.

So the real variable isn't tension. It's geometry. If you own an angled-headstock guitar, this whole discussion matters to you. If you own a Strat, it mostly doesn't.

Why I go part-way rather than all the way

Going fully slack does two things I don't like. First, it lets the neck relax into whatever shape the truss rod alone wants — which, on a rod tensioned to fight a full set of strings, means backbow. It'll settle back when you retune, but if the guitar sits slack in a box for three weeks through variable temperature, it can arrive needing more than a quick tune-up. Second, and more practically, fully slack strings flop around in the case and can rattle against the fretboard for the whole trip.

Going down about a whole step gets you most of the benefit — meaningfully less stored energy at the headstock — while keeping the neck loaded and the strings under enough tension to stay put. It's a compromise, and I'll happily admit it's a compromise rather than a proven optimum. I've not seen a controlled study on this, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who claims they have.

Storage is a different question entirely

For a guitar living in its case at home, leave it tuned. A modern instrument with a working truss rod is already balanced, and detuning every time you put it away achieves nothing except wearing out your patience.

The exceptions are worth knowing. If an instrument is going away for many months or years, slackening the strings — and easing the truss rod off with them — is sensible. Same if you've got something old with a weak rod, or a vintage piece with no adjustable rod at all. Those instruments have been under load for decades and there's no reason to keep loading them while nobody's playing.

The thing that actually matters more than any of this

Honestly? How the guitar is packed. Instruments arrive perfectly tuned and perfectly fine all the time, and instruments arrive slackened and damaged all the time — because the second one was in a case rattling around inside a box that was two inches too big.

The single most important step is suspending the headstock. Pack material all the way around the sides of the headstock so it can't move laterally, and pad above it so it can't travel toward the end of the case. You should have to press the case lid down slightly to latch it. Do the same in the body cavity — enough padding that the guitar has to be pushed into position. Then latch the case, shake it, and listen. If anything moves, it isn't packed.

Then the case goes into a box with a couple of inches of cushioning on every face, especially at the headstock end, because a box dropped upright on that end is the classic way necks get broken in transit.

What we do here

Every guitar that leaves us goes out detuned roughly a whole step, headstock suspended in packing, case-in-box with padding on all six sides. Not because a whole step is a magic number, but because it's the choice that costs nothing and removes one variable from a process nobody controls once the courier takes it. When you're buying used from a distance, that handling is a real part of what you're paying for — you can see what's currently in stock in our guitars in stock collection.

FAQ

Will loosening the strings mess up my setup?

Dropping a step and retuning on arrival won't. The guitar will likely need a small tuning adjustment and nothing more. A long trip fully slack, through temperature swings, is more likely to need the truss rod touched afterward.

Should I loosen the truss rod too?

Not for shipping — leave it. For long-term storage of many months or more, easing it off along with the strings is reasonable, and it matters most on older instruments with weak or non-adjustable rods.

Does this apply to acoustics as well?

More so. Acoustic sets are heavier gauge and pull harder, and there's a thin braced top in the equation as well as a neck. The same advice holds: down a step, headstock suspended, and something soft between the strings and the fretboard.

Do I need to do anything if my guitar has a flat headstock?

Much less. A bolt-on Fender-style neck is far more tolerant of a bad drop. I'd still detune slightly out of habit, but if you shipped one at pitch in a well-packed case I wouldn't lose sleep over it.