How to string an electric guitar in 4 steps ?

Wondering how to change strings on your guitar? Don’t worry; it’s not rocket science. Which is incredibly fortunate for you, electric guitar fans, since you need to change them more frequently than other guitarists (acoustic or classical). If you own an acoustic guitar, we’ve made a great tutorial on how to string your acoustic guitar.

What’s more, in this article we will show you a super easy 4-step process to know how to restring an electric guitar.

What you’ll need to restring your guitar:

A guitar, and if you’re looking for one, we have excellent electric guitar reviews !
New strings
Courage or a string winder (to speed up the process)

If you are wondering when you need to change your guitar strings, check out this list below:

One string broke
Strings are rusty, dirty or sticky.
The sound changed, it’s quite dull or isn’t as beautiful as before
You have to retune your guitar more often than before you don’t remember the last time you’ve changed them.

Step 1: Remove the old strings

Loosen the strings by turning the tuning posts down.
Remove them entirely from the neck.
No bridge pins here !
On a Fender Guitar (or any string-through guitar), you have to remove the backplate and pull out the strings of the guitar’s body.
On a Gibson Guitar or Epiphone Les Paul guitar, the balls are hooked through the bridge. This means that you just need to remove them.
Pro tip: Don’t cut the old strings. It’s always nice to have a spare pair of strings.

Step 2: Secure the strings to the bridge

Each string is different in terms of size and thickness. Remember this phrase: “Eddie Ate Dynamite ? Good Bye Eddie”. This will help you memorise the note names of the open strings: E, A, D, G, B, E. Should you have a thing against Eddies, you can go with “Every Acid Dealer Gets Busted Eventually.” This applies for every guitar : acoustic guitar, classical guitar and electric ones.

The thickest string is the 6th string also referred to as the low E string. It will be the closest string to your chest when you play. Then moving down the fretboard, the 5th string, A, the 4th, D, the 3rd, G, the 2nd, B and the skinniest of all the 1st string, E. Don’t worry; usually, each new string has its own label with the note name attached to it, if not, make sure to know which string you have in your hands !

After you identified the correct string, follow these steps:

Pass your string through the body of the guitar until the ball at the end stops you from going further.
Repeat for all strings.

Step 3: Attach the strings to the tuning posts

First of all, turn all holes from the tuning post towards the centre of the guitar.
Start with the 6th string (the thickest one). Grab it and hold it straight.
You have to cut the string – the excess wire: measure up two tuning pegs from the one you are attaching it to and cut.
Pass the end of the string through the hole, just enough that you can grab it and crimp it down a bit.
Start turning the tuning peg clockwise.
Repeat this process.

Step 4: Tune your guitar

You can now play with the tuning pegs to tune your guitar. You can use a guitar tuner app, or a clip-on tuner , or your ears for this. You’ll find below a selection that we’ve made for you of the best guitar tuners sold on Amazon.
Remember that you might need to stretch the strings a bit, and tune it several times.

Well done, step 5 : it’s time to play!

rocking out rock n roll GIF by Zakk Wylde

Now that you know how to restring an electric guitar, you might wanna know what strings is best for your guitar or what kind of tuner you could buy ? We’ve made a selection of the best strings and tuners just for you !

We’ve selected the best strings for electric guitars :

Get your Elixir Light Strings

Get your Ernie Ball Strings

Get your D’Addario Strings

The best guitar tuner for your guitar :

If you don’t know how to restring an electric guitar, you probably can’t tune your guitar by ear yet. Don’t worry, we’ve made a selection for you of affordable guitar tuner.