I always find it a little apprehensive when it is time to re-string a new guitar. OK, you’ve had the guitar for a couple of months and you want to fit your favourite strings. You take the old strings off and replace – but will the tension of the new strings be any different, forcing you to adjust the bridge? Will your once perfect guitar setup be blighted with fret buzz? Will the guitar’s sound change for the worse? These questions naturally swim around your head like little fishes in the goldfish bowl of consciousness.
My Godin XTSA is a fantastic guitar. In fact, it is probably the best guitar I’ve ever owned or likely to own. Despite this, it had a few tuning problems that meant whenever you used the tremelo arm or “whammy bar” for you youngers, it went seriously out of tune. This can be a common problem. It is an issue with the grooves in the nut where the strings rest against. If the grooves are too tight, the strings snag, causing the tuning instability when you bend strings or use the temelo.
I’d had enough of the guitar drifting out of tune and me constantly having to retune, often in mid song. So I decided to pluck up the courage and remove the old strings and replace them with some Ernie Ball Slinkys – my brand of choice. The XTSA is interesting because it has locking tuning pegs. This means that you don’t have to wind the strings around the capstan like other guitars. You cut the strings to length, with about 2cm extra to thread through the eyelet and then you screw the lock onto the string. The winding pegs are of a tension that when you give them a couple of turns, the string is almost in tune.
Marvellous! This meant that I had my guitar strung in literally half the time. Of course, before I restrung the guitar, I applied a good dose of graphite to the nut. I know it sounds high-tech, but it is in fact a low-tech solution. You take a soft pencil and rub the lead into the grooves of the nut, providing some much need lubrication. This means that the strings will no longer catch and shouldn’t lose their tuning. Do you know what? It worked. The guitar now stays in tune when I use the tremelo. I had a similar problem with my trusty old Fender Fat Strat when I first bought it and have been using the lead pencil trick for years.
Maybe I should record my next video guide for the XTSA? It is rather a clever guitar, you know.

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