How to Clean Input Jacks

Hi, I'm Mike Sullivan. Welcome to Guitar Tech, how to do it yourself. Hi, Gospel Guitarist here with a quick fixer upper. Tip, utilizing deoxid or a contact cleaner and a extra quarter inch phone jack, what you can do with these is use these, you spray the cleaner onto your phone jack like so, and probably all over my camera lens, and then you just run it in and out of your equipment maybe 10-20 times, and then I will also like turn it to get the areas of contact a little cleaner than the rest of it. You want to have good contact for your signal and keep these jacks all nice and clean. If you have an effects loop on your tube heads and things you can get a lot of noise generating out of just dirty contacts in your effects loop for example. It can also be your guitar inputs of course, but you can just spray this on there and be sure to let it dry when you're finished. Do not do this and then just immediately turn on your amplifier, and I would not suggest, and this is arguable, but some people say don't use pressure air to spray out the liquid because then it just sprays inside of all the electronics, so that's debatable. This stuff dries, it's not going to damage anything inside, it's designed to be sprayed on your electronics, but some people will swear against it, I don't know why. Personally I've done it, just let it dry like this or sometimes I'll blow it out. I have never run into an issue myself, but as you can see it just takes a couple minutes of doing this. Maybe, you know, depending on how often you use your gear, especially if you have things where cords are just plugged in in the studio and they just stay there forever, you're going to want to do this probably every, you know, year at least. So maybe you studio guys out there have a little more information on that, but this should help to keep your signal clean and can keep your contacts clean so you won't get that unnecessary noise coming through your amplifier. So you can do this on not just guitar amps but, you know, PA mixers, all the inputs and outputs on your studio gear, your computers inputs and outputs on your sound card, just use it everywhere. Another way to use it, if you don't want to use the deoxy type stuff, I'd prefer this stuff, but you can also use, I guess it's denatured alcohol and cotton swabs, but cotton swabs can leave things behind inside. So I'd prefer to use the plug, I just think it's a tool made for it. So that's my cleaning gear tip for the day. So happy hunting for your keeping your gear clean. Well thanks for watching and see you next time on Guitar Tech, how to do it yourself.