Tips on Restringing a Guitar

Series Summary

The guitar has been around for nearly 5,000 years, developed from even more ancient instruments akin to the sitar, it has been inspiring audiences since its first chord was strummed. It is the primary instrument involved with many genres of music including country, blues, flamenco, rock, and pop, and has been celebrated as one of the most expressive instruments in the world. Whether blending acoustic harmonies on a classical guitar or shredding solos on an electric guitar, the importance of the guitar to 20th century music cannot be ignored.

In this free video series, our expert Bryan Billhimer will teach you how to change the strings on your guitar. He will teach you how to pick the right kind of string for the kind of guitar playing you want to do. He will also teach you how to loosen the strings, remove them from the guitar head and bridge, and put the new string on the guitar head and bridge. Mike will also show you how to wipe down the new strings and the guitar, cut off excess string, and tune the guitar. Mike will even teach you how to uncoil the new strings and stretch or boil them out so they'll hold tune better.

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Bryan Billhimer on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'm going to show you how to re-string and tune a guitar. Hi I'm Bryan Billhimer and I've been playing guitar now for about fifteen, sixteen years. My experience goes all the way back to when I was in the eighth grade. I started playing in bands and then I went to college at the Conservatory of music at the University of Cincinnati. I graduated from there with a degree in electronic media which is audio production. After that I worked in studio for a while and in that studio they had about fifteen guitars, one of my duties was to re-string and tune those guitars so that when the studio musicians came in to play they were ready to go. After that I got a gig playing guitar with national record artist Blessed Union of Souls and I've been doing that for about seven years. Today I'm going to show you how to tune and re-string and this is important because if your playing and gig or your on the road you want to always make sure that you have fresh strings on your guitar. I change my strings every two to three shows and that one will re-insure that your strings aren't going to break in the middle of a show, because that can be quite a mess. Two it's going to feel better to play and it's probably going to sound better."