Learn When to Change the Strings on Your Acoustic 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 Matt Graham will teach you how to change the strings on an acoustic guitar. Matt will show you how to know when to change the strings, how to select guitar strings, and he'll show you all the tools you'll need to change your guitar strings. Matt will also show you how to loosen the old strings, remove the bridge pins, remove broken string pieces, clean the guitar, & lubricate the nut. Matt will teach you how to insert the ball end, insert the other end into a tuning post, measure the strings, and lock the string into place on the tuning post. Matt will even teach you how to wind, tune, stretch and re-tune the strings so you'll have excellent tone on your newly restrung acoustic guitar.

Video Transcript

"MATT GRAHAM: I've been playing guitar for over 12 years and in that 12 years, I've changed numerous, hundreds of sets of strings. And I've tried many, many different approaches to changing strings and to securing the strings to the tuning posts. And I found this one method--I call it the locking method. This one method for changing strings just leaves all of the rest of them behind. It's just the most effective for limiting the time that it takes your strings to stretch out when you put a new set of strings on the guitar, which also limits the amount of time you'll spend retuning your guitar after you put a new set of strings on. So if you're watching this video, it's likely that you're in one of the few situations, either you've broken a string that you need to replace, or your strings have totally lost their life and any brilliance in the sound they've just gone dead is what a lot of guitarists call that, or you just want to freshen up your guitar's sound with some new strings. Or maybe you've purchased a guitar at a pawnshop or in a classified ad or from a private seller and it doesn't have all the strings on it or the strings are dead. So as we move through this series, I'm going to show you how to change strings regardless of which of those situations you're in."