Welcome to GuitarLessons.com. I’m Nate Savage and in this lesson, I want to be teaching every acoustic guitar player, something that they have to know how to do and that is the change your acoustic guitar strings.
So, I have two things right here to do this with, have set of D'addario EXP 11, 12 gauge guitar strings and a string winder, just rewind your string back to it and to clip your strings when you’re done changing them. I like these D'addario string whenever I want because they’re coated and they last forever relative to like a regular set of guitar string, because are probably three times this long, they don’t break hard
ly ever, and they are color coated so you always know which string in the set is your low E string and which string in the set is your G string and like that.
So, let’s open this package up. Grab the set out of there. And those are ready to go. And now we’re going to take off out our high e strings starting with that one, so take your string winder, listen to that string, now you usually loosen it just far enough so I can take it off the rest of the way, I don’t have to sit there and crank all day long. This one comes right off, and one thing that’s handy about a string winder if you have one, almost every string winder comes with a little notch on the end to pop the string pegs out of your body. So if you have trouble getting that peg out of there, just take the end of your string winder put on that peg and pop it right out. Take the string out of the whole, put that to the side, grab your new high E string which will be silver on the end, put your high e string because of the color coating, unwind it, be careful, sometimes they pop out when you unwind them, they can hit you in the finger or the eye or something.
So take the bow end, stick it down to the hole, then take the bridge pin right here and stick the grove, wind that up with the string and push that in, which you have it all the way and pull up on the string to where it catches down the side of the guitar and you can see the little winding on the end of the string just really poking up there.
What you’re going to do is you leave about enough slick in the string for two or three, or maybe ever four reps of that much slack, stick it to the end right here, then usually, I just wrap it around once you get it started on top of the loose end on the sting and every subsequent wrap there we’re going to wind now, it’s going to be below the end of the loose string so you have one on top and all the subsequent ones are on the bottom, so it pinches that loose string and get it in a bind so it doesn’t slip when you’re tuning it up or doing some heavy bending or something like that. So just start winding.
Now, I find that if I use this method, I’d have one wrap on the top and all of the subsequent wraps underneath the loose end of the string that I can either clip it with clipper or if I do this properly, I can use some bend back and forth like a paperclip and break it up like that and it won’t poke later, there won’t be any loose end sticking out that can stab you. So if you do that properly one on top and the rest underneath the loose of the string, it will get to binding and it won’t slip on you.
So let’s go to the B string. Take your string on there and just start losing it again, just enough so you can grab it and loosen up the peg like that. Let’s pull the rest off, come back here with the string winder, grab the little tool, get the peg out of there. The next string is indeed would be a purple ball end, if you can see that. Okay, put this string in the hole, then align up the grove on your peg again with the string, push it down in there, pull up on the string and have it until you see this in there and it’s tight, come down to the other end, feed the end of the string to the string peg for the B string, again leave about that much slack in there for three of four reps, wrap the first one around the top, then probably your subsequent wrap will go underneath the loose end of the string.
Notice my right is kind of pushing down and keeping tension on the string and holding the angle of the string where all the subsequent wraps are going down where the strings is kind of angled up like that, towards the posts.
Now, I’m worrying about tuning so much, just getting to close. That’s pretty close. Give it a little stretch sometimes to make sure the end of the string is seeded well with the bridge pin right there. Then you can clip it or you can break it up, we’ll clip this one so you can see, just like that. Okay now, let’s go to our G string [Demonstration].
Okay, so that’s how you change strings on your acoustic guitar, you may have some variations on your acoustic if you don’t have bridge pins, you may just have to kind of reload it back to the bridge, but don’t let that throw you off. Go out and grab a couple of sets of D'addario, change your own strings on your guitar and if you break one, if you buy two sets, then you’ll have one extra so you don’t have to run all the way back into the music store to get another set of strings you can break on.
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