How to Stretch & Re-tune Your Guitar Strings

Video Transcript

MATT GRAHAM: Okay. So I've got all the strings on the guitar. I've done the twisting and locking techniques. So all of my strings, because I measure them consistently, are only wrapping around the tuning post one time each. But I'm not worried about them slipping or coming out of place because we did that locking technique. So now, we just got to tune up our guitar. And even though we tuned each string individually as we put it on, this whole length of string still has to stretch even though the part wrapped around the tuning peg is minimal and won't have to stretch that much. But let's go ahead and play a chord and see if our guitar is in tune. It's pretty close, you know, because I've been tuning it kinda all along as I put these on. If I look at my tuner, they're all a little bit lower in pitch than they should be because they are stretching. So another way you can decrease the amount of time that you're going to spend retuning your guitar and having individual strings going out of tune at different times because of all this excess string at the headstock is stretching is by intentionally stretching your strings, not--much more so than you would stretch them simply by playing. And so what--the way I like to do that is I put the palm of my hand across all the strings right past the bridge and then I put my other hand around the strings at just past the nut, and what I'll do then is I'll reach under two of the strings with my index finger and reinforce it with my thumb, and I'll just give it some pulls, some tugs and I'll do that two strings at a time all the way down. And I'm not jerking the strings, I'm just putting a nice amount of pressure on, and I'm countering that pressure by pushing down with the heel of my hand. So instead of putting all this pressure--I'm doing with my index finger on the bridge or creating a lot of extra friction at the bridge or at the nut, I'm just stretching the strings. And then I'm going to retune. See now these strings are all about a whole step down, a whole note lower than they ought to be. It actually stretches that much. And so I'm just going to tune them all back up, and then I'll just repeat the process and stretch them again. And what you'll find is if you're a working guitarist and you're going to play a show and you're changing strings for the show, this is a way to get all the stretching done early so that you don't have to tune a lot during your performance.

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