How To Change Acoustic Guitar Strings - Pro Tips for Beginners

Hey guitar enthusiasts, Lauren Bateman here. I'm gonna show you how to change the strings on an acoustic guitar. Uh, maybe you just broke a string on your guitar and you're like, how do I change my strings? So we're gonna go through step by step how to do that on your guitar today using my acoustic guitar, um, that needs some new strings desperately. So let's take a look and start from there. So first things first, let's talk about some things you might want, um, or you might not have them today. Hopefully you have strings because we're gonna need those. Um, I do have a whole video on what strings to choose. We'll put a link up to that. But for today, I'm using the D'Addario Phosphor Bronze. These are the strings that I like to use because they are a warmer sound, and I think that sounds really nice on an acoustic guitar. These are Phosphor Bronze. Um, these are 11s, so they are a custom light gauge. I like custom light because it's kind of a happy balance between super thick strings and super thin strings. And, um, the ones I use are these ones here that have a special coating. These are a lot more expensive than these ones that don't have the coating. Um, this is a 3-pack for maybe like $20. These are probably $20 a set. Um, but I like these ones, so that's what I'm going to be using today. And I'll put links in the description below for all this stuff. Um, a cleaning product for your fretboard, more the conditioner this deep conditioner. This is the Dunlop 02. You can buy these together. One is a cleaner and prep, the other is a conditioner. The conditioner is good if you live in New England like I do with very, very dry weather. It is good to condition your fretboard and get moisture in, and I like to do that when I change my strings because it's a good way to just get some moisture back into your fretboard. So those are the, those are the two products there. Um, lots of paper towels would be helpful. I have a microfiber cloth just to wipe the surface and clean the dust off the guitar because usually when you take the strings off, there's dust. I have this special string winder and wire cutter. If you don't have one, you can just use a regular wire cutter. When I didn't have a lot of money, I used forks and a generic wire cutter that I found down the basement that was probably my dad's. So something to cut the wires, cut the strings because it'll make it easier to get the strings off, and then something to wind the strings. I always wound them them by hand, but this string winder does make it a lot easier. All right, so first things first, we are going to loosen the strings on the guitar. We're not going to cut them taut. We want the strings to be loose. So I'm just going to slowly turn the peg on my guitar to unwind. That's where this winder can come in handy because it just goes on to the loop of the tuning peg. You just slide it on and then you can twirl it. Better for when you're tightening strings. I like to go slow when I'm loosening the strings off. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to loosen all these strings and get you to the next step. Okay, so what I've done is I've now loosened my strings. You can see they're pretty loose. They'll just come right off, um, this part. Oh, this one could probably go a little bit looser. This is what we call the nut up here. Okay, so it kind of has these little cuts that the strings sit in. So now that my strings are much looser, I'm just going to cut them here. So I'm just going to go Cut. Those two are together, I'll cut them at the same time. Cut. And two more. Great. And now that we've cut all the strings, we're basically gonna take all of the loose ends off. And I'll show you, we're gonna come down to the bridge real quick because I wanna show you the tuning pegs and how to pop those out. Okay, so you can see here I have these 6 tuning pegs, one for each string. The best way to do this is to push the strings down into the tuning peg. Okay, put it down into the tuning peg. See, that one's tight. And then hopefully when you pull them out, now that you've kind of unlocked them, they should come out pretty easily. And if you want to keep them in order, you can. It really doesn't matter. They're all— all the slots should be the same, so they should come out pretty easily. And then you will pull all of the little balls out. These are the pieces that were locked inside, and I'm going I'm going to show you how to lock those in later, but that's it. We have now removed the strings from the guitar. I'm going to take off all the strings on my tuning peg, and then we will be right back. But before I do that, I just want to show you, because sometimes these tuning pegs do get stuck, especially if you have a beginner style guitar or you haven't maybe changed the strings in a very, very long time. So when I was younger, um, obviously didn't have a lot of money— my mom would probably kill me if she knew this— I used to use fork because I didn't have one of these things. And I would get the fork because the fork has a nice curve to it, and I would widen kind of the fingers of the fork so that I could slide it around this kind of ball end, and I could then gently pry it out. If it's really, really stuck and like it is not coming out, you might have to take the guitar to a luthier to have them appropriately extract that. But hopefully it'll be like my guitar, you know, they'll come up pretty easily. Maybe one's going to get stuck a little bit, but if you, you know, take a plier to it or you do the fork thing, it will come out for you. Okay, so now I have removed all the strings and I noticed that there's a lot of dust on the top of my fret, my headstock here. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take my microfiber cloth. It's good to do this with like a microfiber cloth because you can just get the dust, especially under like this bridge section here. There's usually like dust or lint or stuff that gets stuck under there. So you just try to clean it up as best as possible. This way you get all your little dust out, and then you're done with your microfiber cloth. You can put that to the side. So now that we've removed all the strings, what I'm going to do is I'm going to just start by spraying a little of this on the microfiber cloth to start. You can see I've used it before, like the grime that comes off. There is a lot of sweat and stuff that will come off from on your fingerboards if you've been playing for a while. So this kind of just starts by cleaning. So I'm just putting some spray— don't spray onto the guitar because you don't want this to get like all over the place. And then I just kind of rub it into the frets and onto the fretboards, and I'm kind of digging in to get the grime and stuff off. This is just kind of prepping to remove some of that initial grime. Now, as a note, um, what I am doing is good for, um, like a rosewood or ebony— well, like this is a rosewood fretboard. If you have a maple fretboard you know, your electric guitar, you have a polished fretboard, you may not want to use these products. Actually, I think it says do not on the products. It should say do not use because this has an alcohol in it and it will, it will ruin the polish on your guitar. So for that, you might just want to use a simple cleaner. Okay. And you don't even need to use the conditioner this next step if you have a coated maple neck. This step is for if you have a porous neck like an ebony neck or a rosewood. Most of my guitars have rosewood necks. Okay, so you can see I got a little bit more of the grime off, and now just, you know, make sure that's dry. And then what we're going to do is we're going to apply step 2. Okay, so that was step 1. So move step 1 out of the way. We are done. We will cap that off. We'll let the Ninja Turtles hang out with that. And now there is this little applicator. Okay, so I'm gonna do the exact same thing. I'm going to kind of shake this up really good, and then I'm gonna squeeze a little to get it into the applicator. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to press into the fretboard, and you can see— if we see on the close-up here, there is an oil that is coming out onto the guitar. Okay, so you'll see this oil, and what I'm doing is I'm putting it individually on each fret. And what this does is it keeps your fretboard from drying out. Okay, especially if you have porous ones like, again, rosewood, ebony, very common fretboard woods. They can start drying out, and if they dry out too much, your frets will start to crack and they will start to pop out of the guitar. Okay, and depending on where you're living— and I'm learning now because I used to live in Massachusetts and it was dry there, but now I'm up in New Hampshire and it's even drier here surprisingly, than, um, Massachusetts. And I've never ever had problems with my guitar, and this is the first year I'm having problems with humidity and drying on my guitars. So I'm having to take extra special care of them now. They're in a room with a humidifier and everything, and it still doesn't seem to be helping, but I'm trying. I'm doing the best I can. So you want to get this on all of the frets, and what I would do, especially up against that nut— that's an important part, right up against that nut. So now you can see it is glossy. Okay, so I have now a glossy finish on my guitar. I would probably let that sit for a few seconds, and this is where our— this is where our paper towel is now going to come, because what I'm going to do is I am going to, you know, I'd let it maybe sit for a little bit longer, but what I'm going to do is I'm now going to wipe all the excess off because we don't want to leave that oil just sitting on the guitar. So what I'm going to do is now I'm just going to clean each one of these frets individually, and I'll show you the after in a minute. All right, so you can see it's still pretty shiny. And what I did as I was wiping, I made sure to kind of even push that oil more into and along the fretboards because that's where a lot of the grime is going to build up. And you can just see on my paper towel— that's why I said if you get paper towels and you kind of dry it off— but you can see there's still a little bit of a sheen now that I have put this in. And I'm just trying to make sure that I'm getting every piece of that board. Okay, so look, it's looking pretty clean, and I just might wipe it with my microfiber to get the dust off quickly. But I'm going to check it now and be like, oh, that, you know, it's looking pretty good. Maybe a little bit more here where I see like it didn't quite get in as much, but that looks pretty good. And now my guitar is all prepped and it's ready for me to put the strings back on. All right, so now we're going to open our strings. So I'm going to put these ones down because I'm not using those. I'm going to open up my D'Addario strings. And another reason I like D'Addario, some— a lot of companies companies do this, but some don't, is they color code their strings. So this is going to have one pack of strings inside. So I'm going to tear open the packaging real quick here. Okay, in addition is get a pair of scissors because I could not tear this open for the life of me. Okay, so just cut the top off. We'll put those scissors on the ground. And you'll notice when these comes out, uh, they're, they're color coded. They must have changed these, that each string used to have its own color, but now they do it that it is Brass, silver, and black. Brass, silver, and black. Okay, so you'll see on the, the back here. So the brass is the high E string and the G string. The black is the A string and the B string, and then the silver is the D string and the E string. That's pretty easy too, because it's very easy to tell the difference between the thick strings and the thin strings, and they're usually paired. All right, so we have the thickest strings together, E and A, then D and G in the middle, and then E and B on the bottom. Now, is there a particular way to string these? Not necessarily, because we're not going to fully tighten them up yet. So what I like to do is I like to get all the strings into my bridge and tightened up there first, and then I pull them up to the headstock. So let's go to our bridge. All right. So we're going to start with our low E string. Okay. And you'll notice this, this bridge piece here. This can come out. You can actually pull this out of the guitar because during different times of the year you may want to raise the bridge, you might want to lower your bridge. If it comes out, because sometimes they're very loose— this one's actually in there pretty firm, but it can come out if I pull hard enough— you want to make sure that it goes back in the same exact way. Because if you change this, if you rotate this and flip it, it's going to change the intonation of the strings and that will change the tuning. All right. It'll make the guitar not be able to stay in tune. Make sure it goes back in the same way. So what you're going to do is you're going to put this ball end into the strings— or sorry, into the hole where the thick string came out of. Okay. And you can see on these pegs, all right, there is a groove. The string is going to slide into that groove. Okay. You can see the string is very loose here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to pull up. All right. You can see I'm actually pulling up on the string. You're not going to break the string. I'm trying to lock it into that groove. Better. Okay, so I'll show you again with the A string. All right, here's the A string now. So I'm gonna do the same thing. I'm just gonna put it into the hole, I'm gonna find that groove, put the string in along the groove. It's very loose. And now just gonna pull up on that, lock it in place. All right, so I'm going to put the rest of the strings into the bridge of my guitar, and I will see you on the other side, because after that we're going to have to put them through the headstock, which I think is the most difficult part of the process. I'll see you in a couple seconds. So let's take this step by step, and I want to thank my Cameo, uh, third camera person Megan, who is helping us out today. Thank you, Megan, for being part of this filming. All right, so you can see now I've locked in all my strings. Okay, so I kind of pulled up on all of them. They're all locked in. They will lock in more, and I'm going to show you that when we tighten the guitar. Um, but what we're gonna do now is we're gonna go up to the headstock because I'm going to put these strings through the holes in the headstock. And just a note, this is a warning, like big warning, these are sharp, very, very sharp. Do not put them in your eye, you will be going to the hospital. Do not just touch them with your fingers, you will put these through your fingers. I have stabbed myself so many times over the years, they are very sharp, so just be Extra careful with these. Try not to stab yourself. Um, you'll probably do it at least once and then you will learn. Or like me, you'll have to do it a few times before you learn. All right, let's go up to our headstock. So what we're going to do is we are going to loop this through the guitar inside out, okay? Because what's going to happen when— I'm not going to fully tighten it, but this string is going to end up sitting in this thick part of the nut. Okay, now what I'm going to do, I'm going to give it a little slack because this is what I like to do. I like to put one loop over the top because what we're going to do is we want one loop to go over the top of the string and then we want the next loop to go underneath. The reason for that is it locks the string in place. So I'm going to give this a little slack. These thicker strings, you don't want to give too much slack because they are thick. So let me see, that's Probably a little bit too much. Well, I didn't give it enough. I gave it too little slack. But if you do that like me, I'm going to show you how to fix it. So we're going to loop this first loop over the top of that string. So watch when it comes around. I am pulling on the string and giving tension, okay? So this is the tricky part, is I'm giving tension so that this string can wind, okay? And now you can see this is the point where it has now gone over the top of that string. I'm going to bend this up. I bend them up anyway, but I just want you to see visually. This is where it becomes careful. Watch your eyes. Okay, I've gone over the top, and then I'm going to turn this tuning peg around. And now you're going to see there's that little ball here. The next loop needs to go underneath that ball. Okay, and as long as you have enough slack to loop, I'm going to show you on this side now. So you can see now I'm coming to the point where it's going to go underneath the ball. As long as you have enough slack to do one over, one under, that's it. That's how much string you need. You don't need 600 loops to keep these guitars locked in. I do have extra slack, so the rest of it is just going to wind underneath. Here you go. So see underneath, here it comes. Once it goes under that hole, I've now fully locked the string. Okay, so I kind of did this tight But I'm going to stretch this string out. Okay, but I have probably just enough. I didn't leave enough, but I have just enough because this, as we stretch the string, I'm going to show you, it's going to turn more. Personally, I would like a little bit more, and I'm going to show you better on the next one. But I think it's good that you see my mistakes too and how you can fix mistakes. Okay, so next one, we're gonna do the same thing, loop it through. I'm gonna leave enough slack now, so maybe like enough slack so that it's like an L to this tuning peg here. And now I'm going to loop it over. See, I like to do that. I like to get one loop on it before I start tightening. Bend that up. Watch your eyes. This might be too much slack, but I wanted to make sure I had enough to show you. There's one loop going under, and now here's the second turn. Right here. There it is. Once it goes under here, it is now— the string is now locked in place. If you do not have that, it will not lock in place and the string can come loose. Okay, this is less likely on the round wound strings, these thicker strings, which is why I'm less concerned about that thicker E string. But you can see here, all I'm doing now is I'm tightening the string and I'm putting the curls underneath. Only one curl needs to go on top.. And as I tighten the strings, it's going to tighten up those bundles. So it'll just lock that string in even more. But again, you don't need a ton of slack. You can see how much I have coming out the top here. There is a lot. And I typically, I had to do this one tighter because we didn't have enough slack. But I like to leave, if you see my string, I like to leave them pretty loose until we go to tune. So that I don't poke myself in the eyes with these. What you're going to do, you're going to bend them up and then you want to cut these as close to the tuning peg as possible. Okay. I like to cut them pretty close so that it's a nice clean cut. Okay. So you get your little cutter, get your little cutter here. Okay. I can see it. There we go. See, I almost got myself in the eye. Bad Lauren. I know it's hard to do this filming live. Making all the mistakes. See? Make all the mistakes with Lauren. Okay. So now those are there. Okay. You just bend them up a little bit or use your tool to just bend them up. You could leave them a little longer if you want to. I just like to get them out of the way because I don't like things— some people leave the extra string and curl it. I don't know. I just think it looks messy. And the other reason I like to leave the strings loose is to leave the tension off the fretboard. Alright? So what I'm gonna do, let's do another one here and then I'm gonna tighten up the rest. All right, so we're gonna from inside out. Okay, you can leave about an L. I'm just gonna go a little bit tighter on this one 'cause this is a thinner string so I don't need as much slack. Okay, I want enough slack to do one around. There you go, I'm over the top. I'm going to bend up my string and then I'm going to pull tight on the string and then start tightening with the peg. So you might have to do a little bit of this where you're pushing down. Okay, that's a good method too. You push down to try and keep that tension because if it's too loose, that's the tricky part with doing strings. If it's too loose, the string's just going to pop off the tuning peg and then you're going to like use some choice words to tighten up these strings. But there you go. And as it gets tight enough and you see it's in, it's in the little groove, the little nook. That's enough. So see, it's in the groove, it's tight enough, but it is still pretty loose because I, I don't want to fully put the tension on the neck of the guitar just yet. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to tighten up the rest of these 3 strings, okay, so that they're all loose. And then I'm going to show you one of the most important parts that people or new students don't know you need to do when you put fresh strings on a guitar. There's a very, very important step, and we're going to go over that next. All right, before we cut out, an important thing. This next string goes up here. It does not go down here. As a beginner, I will tell you I did this a number of times where I'm like, oh, I'll go to the next peg and it's this one. No, it's back. You're going to the top. If you have an acoustic guitar like me with 3 and 3, the next string, the G string is here, then the B string, then the E string. Don't make that mistake. I've done it a bunch of times. And just another note on that too, this side now is now the opposite. So inside out and you're gonna rotate around the other way. Okay, so I'm just gonna put a little more slack on that. And see how I kinked that? That's okay, I can pull it out and put a little more slack. You don't want any kinks on the— this side of the string, but if there's a kink in the binding, it's okay. So say I run that that way. These thinner strings I find sometimes are more difficult. So I've got one over, and now I'm trying to loop it under. So you see, it might have to get there. See how I kind of— I had to push that under to get that loop to go underneath. And there he is. That's the lock-in point. You can see this, the string is now going underneath that string, and now that string is completely locked in. It is not going anywhere. I'll put it into its little groove, and then once I feel like I got it tight enough— there we go, tight enough for me— we're good to go. So I'm now— I've chopped off all my ends, so now I'm just going to get rid of my ends. Be careful because the high E and B strings can sometimes get lost and you can put those through your feet if you walk around barefoot. So there's also that. All right, so we've polished our guitar, we've cleaned it, now we have to tune it. Now my guitar has a built-in tuner. You can actually see it here, so I can turn it on and tune. Or you can use a clip-on tuner. So this is a Snark tuner. If I turn it on, it shows you how to tune the guitar. I have a whole video on how to use these tuners, so if you need— if you don't know how to use a guitar tuner We'll put a link up to a video up here that will show you how to go step by step and tune the guitar. But that's the process now is we're going to tune the guitar before I even turn the tuner on. This is the step that everyone misses. So when you put fresh guitar strings on a guitar, they sound absolutely beautiful because they have a lot of elasticity to them. When you are tuning, a lot of students, what they do is they tune the guitar and then they put the guitar down and then they play it a little bit and then it's completely out of tune. Because you have to get some of the stretch out of the strings. So what we're going to do is we are going to lightly— before, I mean, these are, they're pretty taut, but they're loose. We are going to gently, especially this high E string. That's why I said I'm okay with that being tight because it's going to loosen up. So that's why I said I'm okay with that being tight because it's going to loosen up. Okay, so you can see I'm just, I'm just pulling my fingers. Okay, getting my fingers underneath, and I'm just gently pulling up. I'm not yanking. You will break a string if you yank it. But I'm just tightly— it's going— I'm getting it a little bit taut. But what I'm doing is I'm starting to get a little bit of that elasticity. The strings that are most likely to break in this process is the B string and the E string. It's always good to have a second set of strings because sometimes you will snap them. Okay, this is not happening right now on my guitar, but I want to show you. So if we go down to the bridge, we have our little bridge pegs. Sometimes what happens is you start tightening, these things start coming out. If you start seeing them pop out a little bit, just push them back in. It's just— remember that little ball? The ball's gonna start riding up into— oh, this one I could push down a little bit. The ball is going to start riding up into that, and sometimes it pushes the pin out of the bridge. So if you see it coming out a little bit, just push them back in. These pretty much stayed put, but as we go and tune the guitar now, It's a possibility that that is going to pull up. There is also a possibility that when we tighten the string, you're going to hear a pop. Okay, there's nothing wrong, you did not break anything. It is that ball sliding up into the bridge peg. All right, we'll see if it happens in this video, um, but if not, I just want you to know that if you hear a pop in your bridge, it's totally normal. Okay, I'm going to start with the high E string, so I've put my tuner on. So I'm going to play my high E string, and you can see that my tuner is reading F. This is not F, it's E. We do not want to go lower because the string's already loose, so you might have to tune this quite a bit. Okay, that is not the right E. It is too— it's too loose, so keep going. That's a better E. So always come underneath up. This is what we're going for. So you see, I had to go through E a couple times. This is what you want. Okay, so it's, it's the E where the string is pretty taut. Okay, if you're nervous about starting on the high E string, start on the lower E. Now same thing here, we're going to tune to B. So I just went through B, it's too low. These strings are too low to be in pitch. Usually you have to go through one letter. It's gonna be this B. Okay, there it is. Now it's in pitch. Okay, one more string, and this one's super loose. It's like a bass, it's like a drop D tuning. Alright, so this one has to go up to G. So again, I'm actually turning these tuning pegs pretty quick until I get closer to the correct pitch, and then I'm slowing it down. Okay, now I'm going to tighten this up to the G, and then I'm going to show you something. Hopefully it works. There we go. Okay, I don't mind if I'm a little over because these are going to stretch even more. Let's come back to E. You can see my E— remember when I originally tuned that, it was dead on, and now it's a little flat? Same with the B. It's because as I go through the guitar and I tighten up all these strings, I'm going to have to go back and tune it again. Okay, because we're changing the tension on the fretboard. So I'm going to do quickly is I'm going to tune the rest of these strings and then we'll come back. All right, so just use the— I tuned the guitar, I promise you I tuned all these strings. I'm going to play C chord. It sounds like crap. So remember, I said once you tune the guitar, you're going to go back and tune it again a second time. So I'm just going to do that very quickly. So this E was reading D sharp. Okay, we're going to tune it to A. We're going to tune it back to D, and then when we're done, we're going to get the guitar out of tune yet again. Okay, so here's B. So you can see this guitar was way out of tune just by stringing it, just by tightening up each string. So what I'm going to do again now, I'm more gently but still tight, I'm going to the same thing we did earlier. I'm going to pull up on the strings again. I'm just trying to get some of the elasticity out. So that's what I'm saying again when I said that low E string, I said I'm okay because I know, I know I got room to go because I'm going to stretch this string out a bit. Not a lot, but enough. And I find if you do this a couple times initially and then here after your second tuning, it usually is pretty good. So now I'm going to put this in again. See, it's just a little flat. I'm going to do the A. That one was, that one was really flat. That was like quarter flat. This is just a little flat, so that one's probably stretched out. G, little flat. B, a little flat. E, a little flat. Okay, now I could probably do that process of pulling on the strings and tightening them and tuning it again, and then it would probably be done. But if you string your guitar and you find that it's going out of tune very, very easily, it's probably that there's— you didn't take the elasticity out of the guitar strings. So that is how to put new strings on your acoustic guitar as safely as possible. You can see it's a process. You are probably going to break a string. So if you did, don't worry, that's totally normal. As you do this more often and more frequently, it gets easier and easier. The first time is the hardest. The second time is the second hardest., and then it gets better and better. So if you— if this is your first time, congratulations, you've changed your acoustic guitar strings. You have just gone through a rite of passage as a guitar player, and I hope you found this video very helpful. And if you were interested in watching the video on which guitar strings are best for an acoustic guitar, which guitar strings I recommend specifically for beginners, go watch this video over here where I'm going to go through the different trade-offs of different types of guitar strings, whether it's their size, their material, etc., and how that can actually impact the sound and playability of your guitar. So go check out that video right over there.