How to Restring a Guitar With a Pinless Bridge

I made a tutorial on how to restring an acoustic guitar with a pinless bridge.

Guitar, Guitar Strings, Wire Cutters

First step is to unwind the tuning peg. Turn the tuning beg clockwise to loosen the string. You’ll know you are doing it correctly if you pluck the string the tuning peg is attached to and you hear the tone of the string deepen. Keep twisting the tuning peg clockwise until the string becomes so loose that you can unwrap the string from around the tuner with your hand. Then you are free to pull the string from the tuning peg.

Next, push the string though the bridge. Once the end of the string is pushed through, you can grab the other side  of the string and pull the rest of the string out and away from the guitar. 

*When pulling the end of the string though the bridge, you’ll notice that last little bit of string is curled so that it won’t slide easily though the bridge. Fill free to cut that end off with wire cutters if you don’t want to finagle with getting that part through the bridge.

Finally, you will repeat steps one and two for the rest of the five strings to completely remove the strings from the guitar.

*This is a good time to clean your guitar. Dust will collect under the strings on the head stock and just before the bridge. I usually take this time to clean under the strings really well because otherwise, those areas are hard to get.

While holding the guitar, the strings are labeled 1-6 starting with the string furthest away from you. The strings are also ordered thinnest to thickest with 1 being the thinnest and 6 being the thickest.

The bigger the number on the package of strings, the bigger the string. If you order them from thickest to thinnest, as I did in the photo, that is the order they will go on the guitar. 54 is the 6th string, 44 is the 5th string, 32 is the 4th string, 22 is the 3rd string, 15.5 is the 2nd string, and 11.5 is the first string.

After determining which string goes where, I start with the thickest string or the 6th string. Open the package that holds your thickest string and unwind the string.

Grab the end without the string ball and push it through the top hole or leftmost hole of the bridge. I always kink the end of the string to help guide it through the bridge because if not, it tends to get stuck.

Lay the new string across the fretboard and make sure the string is aligned with the first slot on the nut. Then, put the string though the tuner.

Leave enough slack to leave 3-4 inch gap between the fretboard and the string before tightening. Once you have that gap, bend the string around the tuning peg to help keep the string stable when tightening the string.

Now, you are free to tighten the string. Place a finger on the other side of the nut to keep the string in the first slot of the nut. Then turn the tuning peg counterclockwise to tighten the string.

I try to make sure the string wraps around the tuning peg once under the hole and the rest of the above the whole just like the picture shows. This ”locks” the string into place without having to use locking tuners.

Do not try to over tighten or try to tune a string before installing all the others stringsl. With every new tight string, it will untune all the other strings so tuning them now will be more work that doesn't need to be done.

The best way to tune a guitar is to use a guitar tuner. There are several different kinds of tuners, but for this tutorial, I am going to use one that that is built into my guitar.

1.Turn on the tuner

2.Turn the tuning peg counterclockwise until the tuner shows that it is in tune. (each tuner will be different, but mine shows it is in tune when it displays the note that I want and the bar on the scale is pointed straight up and down.

3.The strings should be tuned to E B G D A E. 

String 1: E

String 2: B

String 3: G

String 4: D

String 5: A

String 6: E

4.Once you have successfully tuned your guitar, you are ready to play!