Guitar for Dummies: Stringing an Electric Guitar

If you own an instrument, you know you must always keep good care of it. While I try my best to do so, I tend not to replace the strings of my guitar and since I do it so rarely I end up having a store clerk do it for me at a music store despite how easy it is to do myself. While this book taught me many new techniques, they can also teach me the fundamentals of taking care of a guitar. When you play an instrument it is one thing to be able to play it, but it's another to understand how the construction of it works and how you can fix it if problems occur without the use of a "professional". I've noticed the fret board of guitar was dirty but the only way to thoroughly clean it was to take off the strings of the guitar, so I decided to look at the book to see how it could teach me.

Electric guitar strings go through more wear due to the less delicate style of playing them compared to an acoustic so it is important to change them. On page 306 in the section "Stringing an Electric Guitar" the text states "Generally, electric guitarists need to change their strings more often than do steel string acoustic or nylon string guitarists. Because changing strings is so common on electric guitars, builders take a more progressive approach to the hardware, often making changing strings very quick and easy"(Chappell 306). The text supports what I've found about changing guitar strings since the whole process is actually quite simple. I took the pliers you can see in the photo to snap the strings after I loosened them so they wouldn't snap at me immediately. After that was done, I cleaned the guitar fret board and started to apply the strings. The steps from the book came as followed (Chappell 306): 

Step 1: 

After easily anchoring the string at the bridge, the book says to pass the string through the hole, align it with the nut of the guitar and put it through the tuning pegs as shown in the picture. 

Step 2: 

Turn the tuning peg to secure the string. Keep on turning until the string is slightly above tune and make sure the excess string is secured around the peg as well. 

Step 3:

Cut off the excess string so that it doesn't stick off the head of the guitar and make sure your guitar is correctly tuned. Repeat these steps on all the strings and make sure that the strings of the guitar are an appropriate distance away from the fingerboard so they don't buzz when you play. 

Learning about how to play guitar strings has impacted me because while I play the guitar often, I don't often think about the actual mechanics and parts of the guitar, and how they work in order to produce the music they play. I feel like this is something that lots of people do with things they use, for example lots of us use laptops often but we don't think about how it actually works necessarily. That's why I think if any of us use any sort of invention often we should always learn how the object works. 

That being said, what type of person are you? Are you someone who likes to learn how things work and mess with them yourself if you have a problem, or do you just have someone else fix it for you? 

Phillips, Mark, and Jon Chappell. Guitar for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Pub., 2006. Print.