How To Change Strings On An Acoustic Steel String Guitar Video transcription:
Hi it’s Anthony here from Learning To Play The Guitar. In this video I am going to show you how to change strings on an acoustic steel string guitar. So to get a started we will just run through what you’ll need. You’ll need:
- a string winder which will helping winding on the strings as you change them,
- a pair of pliers or some wire cutters to cut the strings (the old and the new ones)
- and also a guitar tuner which will help you tune up your guitar with your new strings once you’ve changed them.
And on this guitar particularly I am going to use a set of D’Addario phosphor bronze strings with a medium light gage with a 0.12 on the first string or the high E string.
And then I also have here a plastic scourer which I will use to clean the fret board once I have taken all the strings off. So the first step here is too simply to unwind the old strings and make them loose as we go along. To make the job quicker and easier I will use a string winder otherwise you can take a long time just manually using your fingers here so a string winder just accelerates the winding and unwinding of the strings.
So once I’ve unwound the strings I will use the pliers here or the wire cutters to cut the strings in half and then untangle the loosened string out of the tuning post. Down the other end of the guitar at the bridge here we have the bridge pins which are holding the strings. We can use the little curvy bit there at the end of the string winder which will help you to pull out the pins which are holding the strings into the bridge on the acoustic steel string guitar. So simply pull them out like that and put them aside. Don’t throw them out as of course you’ll use them later.
So you just basically you pull out the string and repeat for all 6 strings. Each string has a little ball at the end of it which holds the string in place. Here goes the fifth string and I will obviously speed this up otherwise it takes too much on real time. So this takes about 15 to 20 minutes to change otherwise it will take about half an hour if you struggling with the first one, so the winder does make it much quicker you know and you need a winder to speed it up.
If you don’t have a winder also you can use a set of pliers for that the bridge pins as well as I am using there and that’s the last string taken of there. So now once I have done that I have taken all the strings out in one go I am going to know clean all the griminess from my finger board or the fret board as you can see it is a lot of gunk from the fingers. It’s been a few months since I have changed the strings so it needs a bit of a clean-up. So to do that I am going to use this cheap plastic scourer. I wouldn’t use a metal scourer because you can actually go dig into the fret board itself. Here I am just cleaning up and wiping up all the gunk which I have left here with the scourer with a paper towel, so it is much cleaner now for the new strings and your fingers of course as you play. So I got the strings off and it’s nice and easy to do.
I have also decided clean here too because it is a little bit dusty. Just simple stuff like that especially done around the bridge where the dust and dirt accumulate. Let’s give it a quick wipe off. If you take your strings off in one go or you can do one string at a time sort of either way. So now with my phosphor bronze D’Addario strings I am obviously going to put them on one at a time. So on the back of the pack you’ll see that each ball at the end of the strings each has a colour which helps you organise which string to use. The first string is the silver with all those colours in between as we go along I will be showing those as we change so if you lose the packet it’s on the plastic wrapper which it has come in but most strings come with this whatever strings you use.
So basically they are all round in this case the D’Addario packet so the brass is the sixth string so the low E string in this case there’s my little tooth so I am going to line them up to the ball as I put the ball in the string into the whole the grove will be facing up towards the head of the guitar and that’s sort of holding the ball in place so let’s put the ball the string in put the pin in and I just pull on the string to make sure its locked in reasonably tight and that it should hold its place. So up here on the head stock I am going to measure out the string with one and a half lengths. So one and a half to two lengths excess of what I will need from the tuning post. So since this one is the first tuning post I am going to chop the sixth string in that position so that means we don’t have excess string hanging out. On most acoustic guitars you get the hole lined up to a right angle where the strings come in and these strings go from inside out on an normal acoustic guitar and other guitars are like that too though some electrics aren’t the same with the position being a bit different.
From outside in which is fairly normal using the string winder to create a little bit tension there around the nut. Sometimes you need to crimp it in with your fingers and hold it in place. I will speed this up because it is a bit boring from the real time. Now move across and double check that the pin hasn’t popped out because sometimes they can. Just be careful of those as you go along because you can end up with some strings unwinding on the hole around the post. And basically it is the same process for all the other strings as we go along so the red one is the fifth string. So the same thing put the string in the hole, holding the pin with the groove heading up the head you can see and then holding tension, one and a half there from the middle so it goes in the middle post being this string or the A string and slide it in and make sure the hole is lined up at a right angle. Then bend the end of the string into this little hole and we feed it through like that little bend. I see pressure around the nut with a finger on the fret board and get the string winder and wind it up as it goes along and I will speed this up again in a second so we can fly through the same thing again.
As you can see I am going under the curve here with the string pointing up and winding on. That’s the finished product of the fifth string. So we have the last two strings, the black basically is the fourth string and do the same process for the fourth string which is the D string and tightening that and make sure it is not popping out up the other end again. We are going to go one half or one half two lengths from the tuning post up too. Using the pliers and, and again we will just do the same thing making sure that the hole is a 90 degree angle at that so it is easier, stick the string in and tune it around.
If you want to change one string at a time then you can always copy how the other strings are adjacently as you wind it on if that makes it easy for you. So going along I have basically changed all strings here in one go. We have cleaned the fret board which was really filthy because this guitar hasn’t been done for at least a few months. So the next string G string or the third string is the green coloured ball again there is my little tooth or pin up that look like teeth to me so I call them teeth cavities. Then the G string on to the furthest tuning post. Again you need one and a half lengths which is roughly that excess we will chop that off and wind it in and then make sure it’s 90 degrees from the nut so the string will hold in as we feed it a little bit through. Give it a little bend and roughly hold it in place, as we wind on the first go with the string winder again and check as you go along that’s all much the same process for each string really in this case and that’s 4 strings on.
So we have two strings to go which are the B and the E AKA the first and the second strings that are two colours silver and purple. Purple for the second on the D’Addario pack. There’s your pin again slide up so that the hole again is now 90 degrees so it is easy to crimp in with these strings. Again we going to go one and a half from the end of the middle tuning post. It well slip so much to go one revolution on top of the whole and then one underneath which I will try and show in a second in the video as we go along. So you get the same process here with the bend I will just turn it around here because it is easy to wind the other way shooting the video. And so winding it up and applying pressure where the nut is holding it roughly in place.
So here you can see one that’s gone above and then we will do another one that will go underneath. It helps prevent slippage because it is not a round string in the sense as opposed to the other four strings on an acoustic guitar so we can see there is one up and the rest of the string is underneath the hole. So the last string is over peg pin tooth in the hole. Let’s do the same process on the last string making sure that it doesn’t pop up as in the last. It is right angles as well. Now we going to go one and a half from the point from the tuning peg. Simple as that! And this is when we going to wind one above and one underneath as we go through to secure the point of the pin tuning peg that is going to go into so it won’t slip too much. Not the best shot there but we got it and above and below which is a bit hard to see it but can see it on the second string so it looks there.
So after you’ve done that you’ll tune up so E is your sixth string using your tuner A is the fifth D for the fourth underneath you got G the third is B standard tuning E on the first string. So once you tuned up it is good to give the strings a bit of a stretch. So here I am bending the strings again and they will go flat. You might have to do that two or three times and it will take a day or two depending how much you’re playing before the strings really settle down because they will stretch in.