Recently I lots of items from Thomann and also added a wide variety of instrument care and maintenance products so I could feature them on my blog and share my views with you. I couldn't resist but finally wanted to give GHS Fast Fret a go.
All the claims that it has are pretty much made-up stuff. Does it clean your strings? Is it maybe just because you have rubbed your guitar strings and entire fretboard with mineral oil then you need to remove the excess oil, naturally you will be cleaning the gunk on your strings.
It's just white mineral oil and the specially formulated label is very misleading. The only thing that could happen to white mineral oil is that they may be using the highest quality of the oil. But it doesn't mean anything.
Just have a look at this calculation that I made;
The applicator contains a few grams of mineral oil at max. I think it's even less. That white/yellow applicator part weighs around 8g with mineral oil included.
The white mineral oil costs around 0.042 EUR per ml and this is a very expensive example. There are many products in the market that cost a lot less than this.
Mineral oil density is around 0.8 to 0.9g/ml.
Assuming the applicator part contains 4g of mineral oil;
How many ml of white mineral oil does GHS Fast Fret offer?
4/0.8 = 5ml and how much does this cost per ml? 9.6/5=€1.92 (And this is a very generous calculation!)
So you basically pay around 46 times more than a pretty expensive mineral oil in the market. If you calculate with affordable options, this number could even go up to 100 or more! Just imagine you would like to buy the same amount of mineral oil via buying Fast Fret, you would have to pay over €1000!!!
It's definitely not worth it at all. Apart from being extremely expensive, this is not how you should care for your guitars and guitar strings. To be honest, I find it very successful as they have been able to sell tens of thousands of this product.
Just look at Thomann's website and see the number of reviews! At the moment, there are around 10000 reviews and we know that not every person who buys a product writes a review. That means there have been probably 60000 to 80000 or more people who bought Fast Fret!
If you are looking for alternatives, here's my advice. Go grab some essential oils and a real string cleaner. For essential oils, I highly suggest you go pick up Sandberg Fingerboard Oil or Music Nomad F-One Oil.
There are natural essential oils that you can toss into your salad and still survive! Note that these are for your fingerboards! But if you ever thought rubbing mineral oil to your strings and the fingerboard is fine, you can do the same with these essential oils.
But if you are after a solid string cleaner, I highly recommend Dunlop Formula65 String Cleaner which will remove corroded particles, clean your strings and also make them slippery. While I was working in the musical instruments business, we would often use Formula65 String Cleaner when we needed to liven up factory strings and remove corroded parts on them.
