Properly Loosening Guitar Strings for Restringing

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Bryan Billimer and on behalf of Expert Village today I'm going to show you how to re-string and tune a guitar. Next thing we're going to do is remove the strings. The first thing you want to do when removing the strings is loosen the old strings. This is important because if you try to cut these when they're tight, you can risk the string flying up hitting you in the eye, cutting your hand. They're kind of sharp! Take the tuning pegs and loosen these until they're pretty floppy. We're going to loosen all six of them. There's also a tool you can use to do this, a string winder. You can pick that up in any music store if you'd like, but it's not really necessary it's just makes it a little easier. Also you see I'm doing this on my lap. I'm comfortable with doing that, but if you're not you can use a table or something like that. You just want to make sure that you put a cloth down under your guitar so you don't scratch it. Now that we've loosened the strings, the next step is to go ahead and cut them."