Beginning to Restring a Guitar

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Bryan Billhimer and on behalf of Expert Village, today I'm going to show you how to re-string and tune a guitar. Now that we've boiled our strings and you want to let them sit and cool for a few minutes. After that we're ready to put our strings on. The first thing you want to do is remember how we took our bridge off when we were cleaning the guitar, we want to put them bridge back on. That easy! The first string you want to put on it the thickest string, that's your low E string. You want make sure, I've made the mistake of putting the wrong string in the wrong spot and that's not good, so make sure you've got the thickest string. A lot of strings are color coated these happen to not be. We're going to put the first string on, we're going to put the ball end of the string, we're going to put that right in this slot on the tail piece. You want to make sure, it's snug. That's going to come out, go right over top of the saddle, see how there?s a little groove in this saddle? It sits in there! Now to do the other end, you're going to have to put the guitar upright. We have it locked in down there, now there?s little holes in these tuning pegs, I like to have to holes facing ninety degrees to the neck so we're going to insert the string this way. You want to give yourself a little slack too. We're going to put the string in like that; we're going to pull it in this way. I want to make sure that I have some slack in this string so that we have enough string to wrap around. Now that we have that in we are going to wrap this back around, you want to pull that nice and tight, underneath and pull that tight just like that. Now we're going to pull it up and see how it's underneath the string we brought in and now you want to start tightening. You want to tighten it down a little bit. Move the string and make sure it's in the right slot and the nut, you want it in the first slot. Pull that tight and we're going to keep pulling this tight as we're winding. Then you wind it up and check it, it doesn't have to be perfect, just has to be tight enough that everything is secure. So now we have our first string on."