Yesterday, during a rather energetic strumming session, I managed to break a string on my acoustic guitar. I wasn’t overly surprised as I hadn’t changed the strings for some time. It was starting to have the “elastic bands over a shoe box” sound that often happens when they get old.
I didn’t have any spare strings, so I went and bought some new Elixir strings. I thought I’d give the guitar a little clean too whilst I was at it. I considered shoving a vacuum cleaner into the soundhole as there was a lot of fluff and dust accumulating in there, but I gave it a quick go with the air duster instead.
I started putting the strings on, one by one. I was winding them all up fairly slack, when I got to the high E string. I started winding it, but it was making an odd noise. I wound a little more and then – it snapped. I sat and stared at it for a little while, then realised quite how annoyed I was at having done that. Unfortunately, the Elixir strings aren’t sold seperately, so I either had to find another E string of a similar gauge, or replace the whole set. Having spent £13 on the set I had, I didn’t fancy doing that, so I found an old string in the drawer I’d never used. Luckily, it has gone on OK, and sounds fine, so I’m not too worried.
After I’d sorted everything out, I had a look at the string I’d broken and it looks a lot like I managed to twist it when I was winding it on, the net result being that when I’d added some tension to the string, it bent the twist and snapped. So it was my stupid fault for not looking at what I was doing. Even so, I was still annoyed at having done it. It’ll teach me to look what I’m doing!