If you've just put on new strings and your guitar goes out of tune within minutes, that's completely normal: in the first few hours the material stretches and settles, and the string keeps losing tension. It's not a defect and it's not your fault — it's a break-in phase, and you can speed it up a lot. In this guide you'll see how to stabilize new strings and how long it takes before they hold their tuning.
In short: new strings go out of tune because the metal stretches and settles; to stabilize them, gently pull each one along its full length, retune, and repeat several times. It usually takes anywhere from a few hours to a few days of playing before they hold.
Why new strings go flat
A freshly installed string is a metal wire, often with a core and a winding, that has never worked under tension. When you bring it up to pitch, the material starts stretching micron by micron and gives a little: the result is that the pitch drops. The fresher the string, the more pronounced this stretching is — which is why in the first few minutes it feels like you have to retune constantly.
On top of that comes mechanical settling: the wraps around the tuning post compact, the bends tighten up, and every tiny slip translates into a drop in tension. New strings, in short, go out of tune for two reasons working together: the elasticity of the metal and the contact points settling in — that is, the nut, the bridge, and the tuning machines.
How to settle in new strings
The most effective way to speed up the break-in is to "pre-stretch" the strings by hand, right after tuning them for the first time. Here's how:
- Tune the string to the right pitch as you normally would.
- Gently pull the string upward, away from the fretboard, sliding your grip along its full length, from the nut to the bridge. A firm but gentle pull, no yanking.
- Retune: you'll find it flat, because the pull took out the slack. Bring it back up to pitch.
- Repeat the pull-and-retune cycle three or four times per string, until the pitch stays almost steady after pulling.
Do this on every string, one at a time, from the 6th to the 1st. At first each string will drop a whole step or more after the first pull; as the cycles go on, the drop shrinks until it becomes negligible. That's the sign the string has settled.
You'll be checking your tuning constantly during this process, so keep a tuner within reach at all times. You can also tune online with EasyGuitarTuner, a free web tuner that runs in your browser with no installation and works on any computer, smartphone, or tablet with a microphone — handy for a quick check after every pull. The only limitation is that, since it relies on the microphone, it's affected by background noise: better to work in a quiet room.
Winding strings properly on the posts
A good part of new-string instability comes from a sloppy wind around the tuning post. If the wraps are too many, messy, or overlapping, the string shifts with every change in tension and slips, throwing you out of tune even days later.
A few practical rules for a clean wind:
- Few, neat wraps. Two or three turns for the bass strings, three or four for the treble strings, are more than enough. The wraps should descend neatly down the post without overlapping.
- Wraps going down. Wind so the string moves down the post: it increases the break angle at the nut and improves tuning stability.
- Lock the end. Passing the tip under the first wrap and then over it — one locking turn — keeps the string from slipping over time.
- Trim the excess. Leave about half an inch and cut the rest with wire cutters: a long tail vibrates, gets annoying, and can shift around, altering the tension.
A tidy wind greatly reduces slipping and gets you to stability sooner.
How long until they hold
There's no single timeline for everyone, but with the pre-stretching described above, most strings stabilize within a few hours of playing. Without stretching them by hand, the natural break-in usually takes one to three days of normal playing before the tuning holds well.
As a rough guide:
| Phase | When | Behavior |
|---|---|---|
| First pulls | Right after installation | The string drops a whole step or more |
| First day | First hours of playing | Small, frequent drops |
| After 1-3 days | Normal playing | The tuning holds for a long time |
Coated strings are a bit of a special case: the coating tends to make the settling more gradual and even, and many players find them more stable over time. They still need pre-stretching, though — the break-in is gentler, not gone.
Staying in tune after a string change
Once the settling phase is over, new strings shouldn't give you any more stability problems. If you keep finding them out of tune, the cause is usually no longer the break-in but something else: a botched wind, a tuning machine with play in it, or a nut that's pinching the string. These are among the causes covered in the guide to the 7 common tuning mistakes, useful for isolating the problem.
Also remember that, new strings or not, guitars naturally drift out of tune with playing and with changes in temperature and humidity: checking often is just part of the deal, and how often it's worth doing is covered in the guide on how often to tune your guitar. In the first few days after a string change, though, check more frequently: a quick pass from the 6th string to the 1st before playing saves you from discovering mid-song that the strings have dropped again.