Restringing Your Electric Guitar?

Not as hard as it would seem?? Just take it slow and everything will fall into place.

As I mentioned previously, get your tools ready, cleaning cloths to hand and if you like, a guitar wrest can be pretty helpful but not essential.

Put a towel down on your work surface, even some paper towels just stop the guitar picking up any scratches.

Give your guitar a once over at this point, check your jack socket, tighten if necessary, check both of your strap buttons, tighten if necessary.

If you’re going to cut your strings off detune your guitar first before you cut the strings, you run the risk of a string snapping back and injuring you, or if you like you can simply unwind them from around the tuning pegs, whatever you do detune first.

Strip the strings out, be careful the strings are blunt but very capable of digging into your fingers and you will feel it for days, not great for your guitar playing, dispose of the strings and at this point if you need to, polish your frets using the impregnated Brasso cloth, you don’t have to polish the frets but it makes for a much smoother playing experience, clean off the fret board with clean white spirit, work the edges of the frets and get rid of any gunk/soil on the fret board, if your neck is an open pore wood like rosewood use a couple of squirts of lemon oil, let this soak in for as little or as long as you like, as a rule, less is more it will help keep your guitars fret board well conditioned prevent any cracks and keep the wood in tip top shape, it also good as a barrier, as you play the guitar the heat from your fingers will bring the oil out of the surface of the wood slightly coating your strings helping to prevent corrosion of your strings.

Once you’re happy with the level of saturation wipe away any excess oil with the same cloth you cleaned the neck with.

Only apply lemon oil if you have a rosewood fingerboard if you have maple it is usually sealed and does not require conditioning/oiling.

So the guitar is clean and ready to be restrung, break out your strings, turn all of your machine head posts so that they are facing the neck, that’s the bit of the machine head that you feed the end of the string through this just helps you feed the string rather than have to fiddle with it when you have a loose string flapping about, I usually start from the thickest string the bottom E and work up to the trebles, taking your bottom E feed the string through the saddles/tailpiece, make sure the string is sitting on top of the saddle and pull it taught to the machine heads, feed it through the post and pull it hand tightly again check everything is sitting where it should be?? Good ?? now as the string is running through the post and the string is at hand tension keep the string tight with your left hand take your right hand and pinch it near the tuning post now pull the string back the same distance from the nearest tuning post and you have the correct length of string to wind onto the tuning post!

Wind the string on go over the top of where the string passes into the post wind it on and it should go under the previous wind, keep on going and string all six (or seven) strings the same way, this helps the string clamp itself and will prevent slippage and stop the guitar from going out of tune, wind the string until all the slack is taken up, make sure the strings are sitting on the saddles and nut, now tune the guitar to pitch.

The strings will now need stretching, this is where you take most, not all the elasticity out of the string, the reason we do this is to help keep the guitar in tune and bed the strings in.

So hold the guitar as if you were going to play it and run your thumb under the string gently pull the string away from you do this over the pickups, then over the twelfth fret then the seventh and then the third, tune the string and repeat the process until you can gently pull the string and it won’t go massively out of tune, repeat the process until all strings are staying in tune.

Play the guitar and run up the neck playing each fret listening for any fret buzz, if there is any buzzing ill tell you how to get rid of it and the tricks and tips I employ.

Until next time.

Sean