How to String an Electric Guitar

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is Mike Larney from the band Naked Underneath, and on behalf of Expert Village I am going to show you how to string guitar. So the first thing is to get the right strings, when you go to store ask for electric guitar strings. They are different than the acoustic guitar strings. On the back of the package it will tell you which string is which, and usually they are color coordinated as well. On the back of here you will see a little hole, just you feed that through, make sure that it is in the groove on the bridge, we want to pull it all the way up, and on the tuning machine heads, on these three strings here, I would like to go away. So what we are going to do is we will pull this through, and then what I like to do is, I would like to pull the string tight to get an idea of how much slack I want, I like to put my fist in all around the 12th fret so that I can get a consistent distance—it is just the way that I can use to measure that. And then again when we turn the tuning knobs, turn them away from… you will notice that the strings here are, when they are circling around, that the string here is on the bottom level, and it will spot out its way up to the top, that will make sure that it locks and does not slip on you later and go out of tune. You take some wire clippers and clip off the ends here, when you are finished. And then in addition what I would like to do once I get a new pair of strings on is, I like to grab the string and loosely, you don’t want to rip the string off, but I like to bend it, and the way that I do that here is I just put my fingers under here, and I am just bending the string there, and I do that all the way down just to help stretch out the string a little bit, so that when I am playing the string it does not loosen itself out, and go out of tune. So I just do that as a precautionary thing, and it tends to stay in tune a little bit better. Now recognize that when you do that, it is going out of tune, so you got to tune back up. Okay, so that is a couple of tips that I find useful mainly when I am stringing my guitar. "