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How to Restring a Guitar

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Franklin Taggart: Hi! I am Franklin Taggart, I am a guitar teacher in Washington DC area. Today we are going to be talking about restringing an acoustic and an electric guitar and we will go through the step by step process that you need to be able to string your guitar effectively and correctly. It's easy to restring a guitar and the best thing to do is to practice. If you don't get it right the first time, you will get it right the second, so do it over and over and over again until you feel confident that you can do it. It is important to restring your guitar in a couple of situations.

The first one is that if your strings go out of tune very easily then you really need to have your guitar restrung. The other one is if you see a lot of residue on your strings, for instance if you look at the strings on this guitar, some of them have some dark patches right down by the sound hole and those dark patches are usually are an indication that the string is oxidizing and when the string oxidizes it looses a lot of its flexibility, it looses a lot of its brightness and so to get your brightness back you need to restring your guitar.

The tools that you need to restring a guitar are, first of all you need to have the correct strings for the guitar, you need to have bronze wound strings for an acoustic, and nickel wound string for an electric. Bronze wound strings allow greater volume on an acoustic and greater brightness on an acoustic and while nickel wound strings are designed specifically to work with the electronic pick ups on an electric guitar. The second thing you are going to need is the set of pliers or some people use a string winder or a peg puller to pull the pegs out of their acoustic guitar. The pliers also can have a cutter on them so that you can cut the end of your strings.

The last thing you will need is an electronic tuner or a pitch pipe something that you can retune your strings with when you are retuning your guitar, to be as accurate as possible. I have been a guitar teacher full time for about ten years, I have been a guitar player now for over 35 years and the techniques that I am going to be showing you are the ones that I learned from a guitar technician many years ago and I have used them for almost as long as I have played the guitar and they are very effective. It is a good way to string your guitar so that it will stay in tune and it will sound great. So let us get started with the acoustic guitar.

Expert: Franklin Taggart

http://franklintaggart.com

Email: FranklinTaggart@aol.com

Franklin Taggart is a guitarist, singer/songwriter, recording engineer and record producer based in Silver Spring, MD. He's played guitar since 1975 and has been involved in some aspect of performing, recording and composing ever since then. He also is a well known guitar teacher in the Washington, DC area. He has been nominated for many WAMMIE awards from the Washington Area Music Association, winning the More »