GUITAR TIP: Restringing a classical guitar

we can burn the end of the string don't let your guitar on fire living on the edge um don't breathe in the chemicals um hey guys if you've ever picked up a classical wizard i noticed that the bass strings the lower three wound with metal if they sound a bit dull or they kind of lost their brilliance it's probably because it's time to change them sometimes you can also tell because they look a bit discolored rusty so i thought we could uh walk through today how to change the strings in a classical guitar okay so let's change these strings to do this you're going to need a new pack of strings a peg winder you don't absolutely need this but it speeds up the process and a nail clippers or something to to cut the strings the strings i'm using today are aquala alabastro light tension strings i'm a big fan of light tension strings and these are actually nile gut trebles it's a formula for synthetic gut although i like the sound of gut the best this is a good solution if you don't want to go the gut route now today we're specifically talking about changing the strings on a classical guitar this won't work for steel string acoustic guitars because they have a different system at the bridge but actually the system that we're going to work with today is going to apply to flamenco guitars classical guitars ukuleles uh all types of early guitars loots and things um so anything but the with a tie block bridge so step one take off these old strings now we don't have to be super careful here um some people are worried about taking off all the strings at once and disturbing some type of tension balance on the instrument in my experience this doesn't make a difference and their luthiers i've talked to seem to seem to agree so i think it comes down to preference my preference is actually to do one string at a time uh and that's just because the other strings stay in tune and then when i put the new string on i use the other strings to tune that string up and then i go to the next string and i tune it up and it just means i don't have to use a tuner uh and for me just makes sense in my head whether we start with string six or one or in the middle doesn't matter i like to start from the biggest string and work down to the top so this is where it really helps to have a peg winder because it'll save you a lot of time i like to pluck the low e first we're going to start with the e and then we're going to start turning and the reason i like to hear the string is because i want to make sure i don't turn the wrong direction like if i kept turning the string is going to snap off at some point and maybe i even risk uh ripping the bridge off so pluck the string make sure you're turning it so it goes all the way down you don't have to be very gentle here you just keep turning until eventually the string pops out at the bridge end very simple just undo whatever sort of knot is there pull the string out voila string gone okay let's go to our new our new pack of strings here open it up actually this is just going to be a set of bases i have here open up the package these aqua strings aren't actually uh labeled so you just have to figure out which string is which based on the thickness which isn't too difficult so we're just gonna un do this little winding here and then you'll see very clearly that one is bigger than the rest and that's gonna be my my low e so we're going to start on the bridge side here and we're going to put the string through the hole and out the back of the instrument now if you have a traditional bridge that only has one hole per string you'll have six holes um and then it's obvious where you put it but there are some modern instruments like this one that have a double hole system uh and the rule there as far as i understand is that for the base strings you put it on the hole closer to the ground and for the trebles the top three you put them on the one closer to your your face so in this case i'm putting it on the lower two of the holes um i pull it through and then i leave about i don't know three or four inches we're going to end up cutting the rest of this off but the more you pull out the easier it is to to tie around you just can't pull so much through that you don't have enough to to tie up top okay so once we have three or four inches sticking out the bridge side i'm going to keep my other hand on the long end of the string and actually i'm going to take the string short end and wrap it underneath the long end pull it taut from here i'm going to stick the short end through the little loop i just made grabbing back to the long end pull it taut now generally i like to go around twice uh depending on the thickness of the string you might have to go over a different way it's looking to me like i need to go around one more time okay i've gone through the little loop twice and the important bit is that the exit point this excess string is going to sit on the underside of the bridge and not on on top of the bridge so i gave it a little a little light yank so now it's not going to go anywhere and we go to the headstock side and before we do that i just want to mention that my online music school our pajato is now offering a 20 discount on lessons this is our biggest discount yet so if you're ready to start lessons on guitar ukulele loot or other plucked instruments just head over to our pajato.com now when you travel to the headstock i like to trace the string to make sure it didn't accidentally loop under one of the other strings that would suck to get it up to tension and realize you had a knot so uh trace it to make sure that it's not intersecting any other string and now i have long end i like to uh change the peg move the peg until the the eye of the of the scroll is sticking out in this direction so it's ready to have a string i don't like to find the hole with the the string so now we just go through pull it taut now from here with the the long end of the string sticking out the back of the headstock i like to go back uh up through the headstock above the scroll it just went on keeping the tension on the string when you do that so now i have the long end looping through the headstock and from here what we're going to do is we're going to loop this new short end underneath the the long string i don't think it matters which side you go through make sure it's taut again and now we have hooked underneath the string and because it's wound there's all this uh there's bumps and that's really a lot of friction so it's not going to go anywhere and from here i like to start winding winding to my left if that makes sense i'm not sure is that that's counterclockwise i guess and eventually it's going to catch and so now i can let go and i should have some some pitch from here save yourself a lot of time and grab your peg winder that's a good sound and start winding again pluck the string and wind just to get a reference of where we are pitch-wise we don't want to go too high so here's where i like to have the other strings because i have my e i need an e here a little flat now you could stop there but that for me would be a waste of time because it's going to go flat right away so let's go a little sharp [Music] you can't go too sharp because you don't want to put too much tension but the instrument can handle at least one semitone or two semitones higher okay let that just hang out now up until recently i actually have been pulling on my strings to give them a pre-stretch i was taught to do that but i was actually warned by my friend marshall bernay who's a really fantastic classical guitar luthier that this can actually damage the core of the string and make it false and i actually have been having a problem lately with false strings and so he advised me not to do that so i'm going to pass on the pre-stretch and instead just raise the string a little up and let it sink back down know that it's going to go flat right away and for for a little while that's okay just keep bringing it back up to pitch now at this point we have some excess string and we have two options option number one is just to take the clippers and clip the excess really close to the knot without disturbing the knot and without accidentally cutting the nice string that you just tied on that happened to me a few times so that's option one that's very cleanly and fine sometimes what i do for my more expensive instruments or my my more expensive strings i mean like if i have gut strings which are pricey uh i like to actually wrap the string around my my finger like that to make a little loop of the string oops that's not going so well okay there we go and with the excess i put the string through the little hole and now i have a little a little loop here sometimes you have to go through a couple times almost there we go so now i have a little little curlicue and if i want excess string for later that i can pull down this helps if you see my other video where i show this little trick um this also allows you to do a trick where if a string happens to snap at the bridge then you have all this excess string you can pull down and just retie and in two minutes you can save the string so your call trim or do a little cute knot and now we continue a string while i'm winding the string if you're enjoying these free guitar tips and want to help my channel you can do so very easily by subscribing and liking it sharing a video and if you're really into the channel and want to help me make more videos you can become a patron on patreon and get all sorts of cool perks like behind the scenes content extra guitar tips just for my patrons and a lot more so you can check those things out so i have two wound strings to pick from uh that are left remember the classical guitar has three wound strings e a d and then three clear strings if they're nylon uh g b e so out of my wound strings only have two left and i have to figure out which one is bigger in this case there's one clearly bigger here and that would be my my a string so let's learn how to tie a wound string around the double hole system you don't have to to use it actually it works the same but if you want to use the double hole system the way it works is you go through the the lower hole of the two the one that's lower to the ground and instead of wrapping underneath the long string we're just actually going to go around the bridge and through now the top hole so i've made a little loop and i'm going to go through the hole above the one i'm on okay and now i have a little excess string sticking out here and with that excess i'm going to actually put it through the loop the little loop that i just made here and now pull the long ends trapping the little extra end on the the top side again and that does the same thing it just stops the string at the bridge i really think it doesn't make a difference which one you use i don't actually know why they invented the double hole system i think it just looks better a common mistake that i've seen some people do is that before they start they actually cut the string to the length that they think they're going to need never pre-cut your strings they're longer for a reason to make it easier to tie them on so i have way more string than i need once it's tied to the bridge but that makes it easy to tie if you pre-cut it and then maybe you're a centimeter short you're out of luck so do not cut your strings until after it's all tied together and actually another thing i see people do sometimes is they they put the string through and and tie a little knot and they have all this excess string sticking out they have to coil the entire string into the scroll and it takes forever to wind and it takes forever to unwind so i don't personally see the point now while i'm winding up my my new a string i can recheck my e's the low e string so it's in tune and now when i do the a it needs to go higher than the e by a perfect fourth and the song for a perfect fourth is here comes the bride so here comes the bride it should be the a string here comes the bride comes the bride and it just sounds like a perfect fourth which is very very pure [Music] no beats if you don't like here comes the bride you can also do eyesight's baby from the upper string that should sound really good again let's bring it sharp just so that the string can settle in a little bit now with my d string it's a thinner string than the e or the a and i went around twice through the loop but the the back the exit point of the string doesn't seem to want to go on the back so i'm going to loop around one more time and now it sort of naturally falls on the back and i just get it more taut maybe it's worth saying just double check that you're going to the right peg don't forget my favorite acronym for the string names uh eddie eight dynamite goodbye eddie e-a-d-g-b-e you know you're getting close when the string that's supposed to be higher passes the lower string and now we're looking for here comes the bride the perfect fourth [Music] here comes the blind here comes the bride there it is now normally you'd be tying on new troubles i'm actually repurposing some some old nile gut troubles that i've had in the past just for this video so you'll see they're a little bit worn out and they're kind of pre-shaped but normally they'd just be one long string these are the nile gut strings by the way they kind of look like a white yellowish color as opposed to nylon which is uh clear like plastic so i'm looking for my g string and again it's the thickest of the three don't misplace the other two same deal with the guitar in our lap with a hat stock facing to the left of us we can go through the bridge hole to our right if you have only one hole it's obvious but with the treble strings if you have a double whole system go through the string closer to you for the normal method it's the same as the bound strings we're going to go three or four inches out of the bridge underneath the long end and then through the loop we just made enough times to have the string exit on the back end of the bridge often with the trebles it takes at least three for me oh no i just did something that i told you not to do i guess this is a good learning moment here because this is an old string that i was repurposing it was pre-cut when it was already on the guitar and that means i tied it to the bridge but look i didn't make it to the g so now i'm going to have to get creative and this children is why you don't pre-cut your strengths okay i'm going to use the double hole method that i think i used last time because it uses less string on this end so it goes through the same hole the string closer to me and i'm going to go back around and through the second hole in this case it's closer to the ground and then i'm gonna go with that little tiny end through the loop i just made trying to salvage just mustering as much string as possible because i'm not gonna make it i pull it taut okay let's see if i can do it we have just enough okay it's gonna work good um that is really annoying so that's also another good reason to just not cut the long end of the string on the headstock side i find my next thickest string there's only b and e left so b has to be the thicker of the two as we get to the b e strings the strings can get very slippery and thin and so make sure you tie enough times around if you're doing the traditional method because if it slips out it's going to whack the top of the wood and put dings and damage the top of the guitar you can also just put a thick piece of paper on top here to protect the guitar now if you're a pyro and you really want to make sure that string goes nowhere well we can burn the end of the string don't let your guitar on fire living on the edge don't breathe in the chemicals um now you have a little ball that's created on the end of the string and now it'll catch and it won't pop out on you the first time you do this you're bound to make some mistakes you know so plan on spending a good half an hour to an hour the very first time but there's no reason you should be bringing your guitar into the shop to change the strings you can if you have a guitar you can change the strings this is the moment where we're no longer tuned to fourths on the guitar all the strings are tuned to perfect fourths except for the g to the b the third string to the second string that's a major third and if you want a song for that you can do do a deer do a deer and the deer is the b string so do a deer [Music] and that should be a b you can double check by playing ice ice baby from the first string so that would be too high that'd be too low there we go and like i said although your first time might take you a while once you've done this a lot it's pretty easy and it takes me about 12 minutes to do the whole thing okay the guitar is restrong and now we just have to clip off the excess strings don't cut the good strings or tie them into little curlicues if you want to salvage the strings for later mind you the guitar is not going to stay at this pitch it's going to instantly go flat and every time you pick up the guitar it's going to need to be tuned up again for at least a few days and then the strings will stabilize and now you should hear a lot more resonance and shimmer in those new bass strings especially it's hard to tune now it's coming flat already on me but it still sounds so good it sounds like my guitar has come to life and i have a brand new instrument [Music] so thank you so much for watching uh please do subscribe if you haven't already and i will see you guys next time [Music] you

Channel: Brandon Acker

Views: 187,801

Keywords: guitar tip, classical guitar, brandon acker, rob scallon, guitar strings, changing strings, tutorial, guitar lesson, free lesson, classical music, fingerstyle, fingerpicking, adam neely, antoine, andy mckee, tommy emmanuel, tonebase, guitar salon, marcin dylla, ana vidovic, andres Segovia, julian bream, tarrega, scott tenant, eliot fisk, gfa, alexandra whittingham, nylon string, nails, acker

Id: JRR5cX8eS0g

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021