The story is following 3 up and coming musicians in their day to day lives. One of the 3 is the singer of my band, Tito Deville and the Tito Deville Band will most certainly be highlighted and showcased!

Hopefully this will turn into a series and gain us even more nationwide play!

Restringing an electric guitar. Kind of important? YES! Fresh strings are the greatest thing on an electric guitar. Here is a short write up on how to restring an electric guitar.

So you just have to ask yourself one question…and it’s not – ‘Do I feel lucky?’….It’s – Do I have a Fender style Bridge or a Gibson style bridge?

At the end of the day, we’re just tightening strings around a post but these bridges are certainly different. A sure way to tell is: Do you insert the strings through the backside of the guitar and the strings actually go through the guitar? If yes, this is a Fender style bridge, commonly used on Strats and Tele’s. So you’ll probably have to take that white rectangular piece of plastic off (and many people leave them off). Basically, if you don’t have this kind of setup, you have a Gibson style bridge, which is pretty self-explanatory.

Next step is to get those old nasty strings off of the guitar. But wait! Don’t snip them off when they’re at full tension. Wood doesn’t like that too much. Loosen all the strings so there completely saggy and use whatever means necessary to get them off. Snip them with wire cutters or whatever. Just take them all off and put them in the garbage or some kind of metal recycling system you may have implanted.

This would be a good point to give your fret board a wipe down using a clean dry cloth to remove any gunk. Make sure to dig around each side of the frets, as this is an area prone to gunk buildup.

So, lets get those new strings on, shall we? So, before you take the guitar strings out of the package, you should know they come in a specific order and they come organized in the box so you don’t have to guess where the .036 size string goes and nonsense like that. If you jumped the gun on this and strings are out of the package and dangling everywhere, looks like you’ll be using your eye to gauge which string goes where! Lesson learned!

So this is the stage where we saddle these suckers up. I suggest putting all the strings through the bridge so all you have to do is grab individual strings and wind them up. So since you have your fresh strings pilled up in the same order they came out of the box, just take each string, guide it through the bridge holes and move on to the next until you have all 6 strings dangling from the bridge system.

Now, lets wind ‘em up. This is a finicky area and you will get some different opinions on this. I personally use extremely thick gauge strings so the idea of winding up my size 60 string to the tension of an E note is a little bit hard on the neck of the guitar, so it’s a good idea for me to evenly disperse the tension of the strings.

So, how about we tighten the strings in this order: D, E , B, G, A, e

But wait! Before you do that there is The most important thing ever that you must remember. We NEED to have several string wraps around those winding posts! Why? Well, this helps keep the guitar in tune. If you can imagine, the more wraps you have, the more solid the connection the string has to the guitar so we run a very minimal chance of string slippage.

Before you tighten the strings, you need to have a certain amount of slack for each string to allow 2-3 wraps around the string post. Your middle finger is good for a few things including a measuring stick for this purpose. Put the string through the winding post. Touch the tip of your middle finger in the middle of the fret board (about 10th fret) and pull the string out of the winding post until it’s reached the other end of your middle finger. This is roughly about how much slack you need on the string before you start winding. Wind away! To ensure nice clean wraps, you can guide the string using your hand while your other hand is winding the tuner with that handy string winder you bought!

So how much do you tighten the strings? First, just get them all tightened to the point where they’re making clear sounds, or even a bit tighter then that. Once the strings are all making clear sounds. Use your handy dandy tuner to tighten each string up to pitch.

Wow! What a fiasco, you’re done! But not quite.. These are brand new steel strings that have never been put at this tension before in there life. They need to stretch out! You can help this process by pulling up on the string at the 12th fret and the bridge of each string, retuning your guitar and repeating this process until it seems the strings are staying in tune.

I hope you found this article helpful. After doing this process many times, it will be a very quick and easy process! By the way, when your strings become discolored, don’t sound as good as they used to and get buildup on them – It’s time for a change!

So, you have a guitar! What’s next? Learn how to play? Or you know a bit and it’s time to advance you skills? Maybe at the time you bought your guitar, the sales person encouraged you to pick up a “learn how to play the guitar” book. If you weren’t lucky enough to spend another 10-30 dollars at the time, I’m sure it’s crossed your mind to pickup one of these ‘do it yourself’ books. In this short article, my goal is to save you a lot of time and frustration with the very least of getting you to think about options and alternatives.So, everyone is different. In my 6 years as a Guitar Teacher, each and every one of us learns in a different way and at different speeds.What I think is frustrating for everyone is when wehearof these guitaristswith this miraculousgift of “teaching themselves” or “learning to play by ear”. Don’t you hate those people? I for one did not learn how to play guitar this way and with my years of graduating from music college, playing with many different groups and teaching hundreds of people, I STILL HAVEN’T MET A PERSON WHO HAS STARTEDGUITAR IN THIS WAY!

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this type of learnerdoes not exist. Doesn’t that make you feel better? Lets face it,we all need some kind of guidance and starting point! Maybe it’s just a cool thing to tell your friends that you learned on your own or something…nasty rumors!! It took me years of learning other artistsworks until I could start ‘learning by ear’ and ‘teaching myself’ techniques and apply them.So how do we tackle guitar? Guitar books, right?How hard can it be?NO! Hear me out…

So what’s my beef with guitar books?I don’t hate ‘do it yourself guitar books’I think the first TEN pages are great! They explain proper guitar posture, the names of the parts on the guitar, the names of the notes on the strings….etcetc. This is all essential knowledge. Then as we scroll through the rest of the bookand we start learning how to read music and play some classic songs, which doesn’t sound so bad but after 3 weeks of learning “Ode to joy” and “Yankee Doodle” your going to wonder how to play REAL guitar and wished you didn’t waste 30 bucks on this stinky book.

How to we bypass all of this junkand start playing this amazing instrument called the guitar? The key is to take intelligent action on this task. This involves getting a model a mentor and a plan.