HOW TO RESTRING AN ELECTRIC GUITAR WITH STOPBAR

It may seem simple, but that doesn't mean it's easy — at least, not until you watch this video. Being a guitar player means understanding and maintaining your instrument. Perhaps the most important aspect of that is changing your strings regularly.

This video gives you a short, sweet tutorial on restringing a Les Paul electric guitar that has a stopbar tail piece, which will afford you the confidence of knowing you did it right. If you just want the quick-hit takeaways, you can read the basic steps written out for you below.

Step 1:

Wind the tuners clockwise to loosen up the strings, then cut the strings at a point near the middle of the neck. You can then easily remove the two sides from the bridge and tuners.

Step 2:

Insert new strings through the bridge and assure the ball end is tight to it.

Step 3:

Thread the end of the string into the hole on the tuning peg, pulling it through, but leaving some slack near the nut.

Step 4:

Wrap the end of the string back under and around the part of the string that's through the tuning peg. This locks the string and allows you to easily tune up. Then you can wind the tuner so the string goes around the tuning peg 3-4 times and clip the excess.

Step 5:

Repeat with each string, tune it to pitch, and stretch the strings by pulling them a bit along the neck.

While your guitar tuning may fluctuate a bit as the strings stretch, necessitating some retuning, you'll be good to go with a set of fresh strings.