Changing to different tension guitar strings. Anything I should know?

Question

Will I have to adjust something? I'm going from medium tension to extra hard; figured I'd experiment a bit.

Answer 1

When you change the string tension you have to adjust the intonation and it's a good idea to check that the neck isn't curved because of the extra pounds of pull. Sometimes action is affected as well.

If you don't know how to intonate your guitar, google it or take it to a guitar tech. Usually a setup isn't too expensive. If you didn't know, intonation means how well the guitar stays in tune with itself when you play notes low vs high up the neck. If the string isn't adjusted to the proper length the notes around the 12th fret will sound out of tune compared to the notes near the nut.

If the neck is curved you will probably need to have the truss rod adjusted. I would suggest taking it to a tech for that - s******g up a truss rod can damage your guitar.

If you get buzz after you swap strings you need the action adjusted. Again, google it or take it to a tech.

Saul

Answer 2

You should know that's a good way to mess up your guitar as guitars are usually designed to use a certain guage string.

You should know that the biggest difference will be that the guitar is much more difficult to play.

You should know that people who brag about how heavy they're strings are and what a great unique tone they produce are just trying to sound cool, are exagerating and or lying, and would say just about anything to get your attention and fool you.

You should know that 99.9% of guitarists, including the famous ones, use standard guage strings that the guitar was designed for.

You should know that after you spend a day or two making all the adjustments to your guitar to make it function with the new strings, and after you realize how much you now hate the way your guitar plays, you will have to spend a couple more days readjusting everything to get it back to normal.

You should know that I'm telling you all of this from personal experience and only want to save you several days of work and trouble in case you're just bored and want to mess with things.

You should know you could save yourself a lot of trouble if you just change one or two strings to experiment and find out how that feels... - just change your skinny e string to a fatter one and see what you think - that's the one that will have the biggest tone difference anyways.... do you like how that feels? well,... decide from there.

Good luck.