Stringing A Classical Guitar
April 26th, 2010
How To Tell When You Need New Strings?
Guitar strings, like socks, wear out and need to be exchanged for new strings. One of the easiest ways to know if you need strings is when they sound dead and look discolored. Professional guitar players may change their guitar strings once a week, but most players should get new strings a couple times a year.
Three factors for wearing out strings are the climate, how often you play the guitar and the dirt and sweat on your hands. A colleague of mine mentioned to us that his hands were so acidic they caused strings to go dead in a day.
Later, he needed to borrow a guitar for an hour. I gave him my guitar to use and was quite surprised to get it back with dead guitar strings. He was quite serious!
Check out the quality of your guitar strings. When your guitar strings look rusty or worn, replace them with ones.
Stringing Your Guitar
You need to secure the weight of the string on itself at both ends of the string. It’s easiest to see this in a video. Take a couple minutes to view the video here. Be sure to secure both ends of the classical guitar string so they do not slip.
Tune Your Guitar.
First watch the video to see how to properly get the strings on. Next you will need to tune the guitar. Nylon strings tend to go out of tune quicker than steel strings and they usually need a lot of tuning for the first few days. To help them stretch in, you can physically pull the strings with your hand.
The fastest way to tune a guitar is by using one of the guitar tuners. Now there are lots of easy to use automatic tuners. A couple tuners I’ve used are Qwiktune and Planet Waves. My favorite tuner is the headstock tuner. Headstock tuners even work accurately in a noisy environment. They attach to the head of the instrument and tune by the vibration of the guitar.
Categories: Guitar
