It's time to change the strings on my guitar, and I thought I'd share my method with you today.
I start by loosening off the strings, just a little bit. Do both sides. Then I'll cut them, it speeds up the process a little bit. Next I'll just quickly unwind them from the headstock. Now I'll pull the pins out of the bridge and take the remainder of the strings out.
Now because I've had this guitar for well over ten years, you can see there is quite a bit of fret wear. But there's also quite a bit of dirt gets picked up from my fingers playing 20 plus hours a week on this instrument, so I need to clean it.
And the way that I clean it is, I use light gauge steel wool and follow the grain of the wood and go up and down the neck. This not only cleans the grit out of the fret board, but it also polishes the frets. I'm not pressing really hard and it's just basically a quick buff.
I'll take a tack cloth once that's done and I'll remove any remaining steel wool fibers.
Next, I'll lubricate the neck with a little bit of coconut oil. I've used olive oil, all kinds of different products. Typically I'll use what I have on hand, and today it's coconut oil. I'll rub that in thoroughly getting the fret board hydrated and next I'll just wipe off the excess. Now we are basically ready for strings.
So, I put the pin with the first string in. Typically what I do, once I've put it through the eye of the machine head is I'll pull it back at least two winds, like this. Then I'll put a hard kink in the loose end against the machine head and I'll wind it, holding it with my right hand until I can feel the tension and I know the string is taught.
Now I'll just repeat with the remaining five strings. I sped it up here to save you the pain.
Next I'll tune the guitar roughly and I'll stretch the heck out of the strings so that once I do have it tuned, it will stay in tune. You can see me pulling on it quite aggressively. Once a string will hold its tune I move on to the next. And then once I've completed them all, I just bend the strings back and forth and it snaps them off tight against the hole of the machine head leaving the headstock looking rather clean. As you can see here.
And that's all there is to it for my process of changing strings. How do you do yours?
I hope you enjoyed this, have a real great day!