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How to Loosen the Strings on Your Old Acoustic Guitar

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Part of the video series: How to Change the Strings on an Acoustic Guitar

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Summary: Learn how to loosen the strings on your acoustic guitar to ensure that your instrument will remain in tune and play music beautifully in this free video series.

Views: 631 | Tags: guitar, strings, scales, theory, change, tuning, acoustic, pick

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About the Expert

Matt Graham Matt Graham is a graduate from Texas A&M University and pursuing a Graduate degree from the University of Texas. He also has a love for cooking and not much m... read more

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Video Transcript

How to Loosen the Strings on Your Old Acoustic Guitar

MATT GRAHAM: Okay, so what I've done is I've laid the acoustic guitar down on this ottoman. A bed, a desk, even your case opened will serve as an adequate workspace for changing strings. You can prop up the guitar with a pillow or even the lid from the storage space inside your guitar case. You want to prop it up so that you can loosen the strings. Now, you want to pay attention to which direction the string is wrapped around the tuning post to make sure you're not, you know, just going to tighten it up and put a lot of torque on the neck. If you're new at this, another thing to do as you loosen the strings is pluck. If you're going the right direction, you'll hear the pitch of the string drop because we're loosening them. If you go the wrong direction, it will go up. And again, this is a time where if you have one of these string winders it's a--comes in really handy because you can very rapidly loosen the strings. Now, some people will say that you should cut the strings off with wire cutters, but I don't agree with that. I think that a lot of times you can reuse these old strings for other applications which I'll talk about later. So you want to be careful if you have your entire set of old strings intact to unwind them in a way that preserves them.

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