If you travel often with your electric guitar, you likely at one point decided it was worth investing in a quality hardshell or heavy-duty flight case to protect your instrument. The worst thing that could happen for a traveling guitarist is to arrive at the destination, pick up your checked-in guitar from the conveyor belt, and open the case only to see that your guitar didn’t make it in one piece.
The good news is that electric guitars are, overall, compared to acoustic guitars or any hollow body instrument, fairly durable. After all, they consist of solid pieces of wood. And yes, even if the guitar is chambered, it’s still much more durable than a fully hollow body guitar. So as far as instruments go, electric guitars are on the more durable end.
That being said, here is the bad news. Like any instrument, they are not indestructible of course. And this brings us back to the worst-case scenario. You get off your flight, open the case of your checked-in guitar and see that part of the it is no longer attached to the rest. The part that we’re talking about is, if you haven’t guessed it, the headstock.
As it turns out, the headstock is the Achilles heel of guitars. Unless the guitar case is super well-padded with a durable outer shell, like a quality flight case, the guitar is at serious risk during transportation. And even that is no guarantee. The joint between the neck and headstock is just highly vulnerable to breaking if not handled delicately.
Now, if you want to avoid all of this and worry just a little bit less about your guitar, the answer is to upgrade to a headless guitar. Durability is just one of several great reasons to consider getting a headless— which you can read more about here.
As long as your headless guitar is in a well-padded bag, like the Kiesel SC9N Ultimate Soft Case, it is likely to do very well during transportation. Not only is this true because it lacks the vulnerability that comes with a headstock, but also because it’s shorter and more compact. This means that you can more easily bring it with you in places where you couldn’t bring a headstock guitar, say for example, into the plane where it can fit in the overhead bin of most planes.
So thanks to the practical design of headless guitars, you can likely safely say goodbye to the days of lugging around a heavy and bulky hardshell case!
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