How to Cut Old Strings & Pull Out the Balls from Your Electric Guitar

Video Transcript

"MATT GRAHAM: Okay. So we have all these strings disconnected from the tuning post on the headstock. And our goal now is to get them out of the bridge. And this style of the guitar, as with many other types of electric guitars, the strings actually go through the body, we call that a string-through-body design. And if I put this on, some of these strings from the front of the guitar, you can actually see the beaded ends of these strings coming out of the back of the guitar. And so you can just pull it, pull it through. What's going to happen is it's going to get really hard to pull it through once you get to that part where it was twisted around the tuning peg. And you could force it out if you want, but that's going to create a lot of friction on the bridge, on the inside parts of the bridge. So what some people like to do is just take the whole big bundle of strings and with your needle-nose pliers, gripping both sides so that it doesn't flap and hit you. Cut the strings, okay? And now, you can set these aside and when you push these strings through the bridge from this backside, they should come through a lot more easily with a lot less damage done to the inside of the bridge. So if you see here on the back, I've began to push them through and they just come right out, because those looped pieces of string that were around the tuning peg are no longer obstructing the other side of the bridge. So again, we'll just keep working one by one, pushing these ball ends through, just like that one, and then grabbing them and pulling them all the way out."