How to String an Electric Guitar That is Equipped With a Locking Bridge

Series Summary

Have you ever wanted to learn to play guitar? Maybe it is time to try picking up a new hobby and learn to play the guitar. The birth of the guitar is one that is not exact, but guitar-like instruments have been used since ancient times. Through the years, people have learned to play this instrument with some practice and determination. You, too, can learn to play this instrument if you are willing to put some work into it. Whether you are just beginning or have never held a guitar before, this video series will lay out the basics of the guitar. This collection of guitar lessons will teach anyone what they need to know to know the fundamental basics of playing the guitar. Watch as an experienced guitarist explains dozens of basics that you'll get hours of practice with. Every great guitar player has practiced countless hours. Take these videos and woodshed. By the time you are though watching our expert series you will know the difference between a classical guitar and an acoustic guitar and know what a Dobro is.

Video Transcript

"What we're going to do now is show you how to string a guitar that is equipped with a Floyd Rose "floating bridge". We're going to replace the G string here, so we'll put it in and take out the old one here, replace it with a new one and bring it up to pitch with the rest of the guitar. You have your three locking nuts here at the nut of the guitar. This is the thing that causes the most problems with people who are unfamiliar with the Floyd Rose guitar, and go out and buy one. Often times they'll go ahead and try to tune the guitar by the normal procedure, which would be just to turn the tuning pegs, and if you're tuning them to try to make the string go sharper, you will break them instantly. Because of the pressure here, these nuts are locking these strings at this point. So the middle one is the one we're going to loosen. We have an Allen key which fits in here, here we go, and we'll loosen that. So now we're going to look down here at the bridge of the guitar next. You'll notice at the back of the bridge these Allen posts here, each one, each string as its own. We are working with the G string, this one right here, so what we're going to need to do, these are tighten down, so now we're going to need to loosen this one until eventually the string pops out. Now we just need to go up here and get the string around that, and now we just remove the string. You can either turn the peg or use the easier, lazier way that I just did. So what we're going to do is clip the end of the string off, and you take it just above the line, you want to make sure you're above the line, so you want to cut it close to that. So long as you are making sure you are above that line. Take the string and we need to insert it into its position here, and there is a little slot, you'll notice, and a little square, little square right there, and what we're going to do is slide it right in here and right under that square, and you'll notice it will come to a point where it will stop. So now that we've done that we want to hold it there and make sure we're applying enough pressure to keep it all the way and then we go back to our posts here and we want to tighten it back up. Tighten it up nice and snug, you don't want to over crank it. So if you take a look here at the nut, you see where the G string goes, there is the slot for it, just put it right through there like so, and pull it through. So we're going to clip the end of the string, you want to make sure we have enough to wind around, you want to go about, say three inches or so. Let's see what that does for us, right about here, and we'll clip that right there. I'm just tightening, with my hand, I'm just tightening this nut, just a tiny bit to hold it from flopping out of its slot in the nut there. Then we'll go ahead and begin to tighten her up. And you want to run over the top of the string the first wind or two. And I'll go over twice here on the top and we'll, as we come around, I'll end this up and we'll go under. You want to hold it down, you want to wind the string of course from the top down. So it's starting to get nice, nice and tight. Got it in there now, see what we've got. Once you've got the string in there, it's tightening up, and may want to give it a little tug once in a while as you are doing that also. It aids in keeping that string in tune. Now we're going to our center nut here and we're going to tighten it up with our Allen wrench."