How to Restring a Classical Guitar

Video Transcript

"Okay. So now, we're going to look at how to string a classical guitar. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to tie on, we're going to change the sixth string on this guitar, or the low E string. Okay? And we're going to start by; a lot of times, you'll have strings, your classical guitar strings, you'll notice that at the end they'll have a little bit of winding that kind of thins out, and you'll have an inch or two. You'll notice that at the end, where the string is a different width. And that you'll use at your top, through the headstock. The classical guitar, you'll have holes for each string. And what you're going to do is put the string through in this direction, towards the bottom of the guitar. We'll wrap the string around once underneath. Bring it around and bring it underneath the string. And then we'll bring it down a little bit so we have a little bit of room and enough slack so that we can bend it again and push it through. Now once we've done that, we should be able to take it and do one more, just like that. And then, we will pull the string very tightly so that we can get that all the slack. Get the knots nice and tight. Okay? We have the post turned so that the hole is facing us. We just put the string through the hole, in this way. And this allows us to tie. This is much more flexible, this little couple of inches at the end of the string. It allows us to put a little knot in, if we choose to. There are several different methods of locking. So what I'm doing is I'm holding the tension on both sides of this little knot that we've tied. And this is just one method of many. And as we do this, you can, if you choose to, even again wrap the end of the knot back around the string. And it'll stay enough so that we can simply pull. We're turning the key and rolling the post. And that pulls this string that we are turning onto the post over the top of our knot on the outside, if you notice. When I say the outside, I mean the outside of the hole on the post, you see. All right. And then after we've done that once, maybe twice, where we've come around to our tie. We've crossed it. Now, we can go ahead and take our string and bring it across. As you see, we've brought it across our first wind around the peg, or the post. Now, some strings will have an excess amount of length on the string. And you will check it, and you can go ahead and cut it. You want to just make sure you've got a good three inches or so. We're keeping a consistency of tension as we're putting the string on the guitar, which helps a whole lot in the string's ability to hold its tune once you're done. So let's go ahead and see. Finish this here. And we kind of keep the same amount of tension. As the string gets closer to the neck, the tension obviously increases."