You may have done it for years and not had an issue. At the end of the day, you can do what you like, but I've read the advice against doing it on nylon strings for years and will personally stick with that.

But if that happened, I would then change the string again for a fresh set the next day when I had more time!įor some reason this pre-stretching issue gets really emotive. If you have a gig and you pop a string 20 minutes before show time (or worse, during the set) - what are you going to do? Refuse to play because your new string is still stretching? Of course not - you make do and get the instrument as ready as you can for the performance. But I have done it where time was of the essence. Does that mean I don't do it? Well, no, I have done it and lots of professionals do too. I stress, this is NOT just my advice, but advice taken from a number of very reliable sources. This can lead to intonation issues and ultimately shorten the life of the string. The advice from these experts is that manually stretching strings this way can create thin spots on the length of the string where they shouldn't be. I DON'T recommend it myself, and that is based on discussions with string makers who don't recommend it, and also advice from people like Frank Ford at Gryphon (a VERY highly regarded stringed instrument tech). That is the process of tugging or twisting the strings to get them to hold pitch quickly. They may still take a day or two to settle and you may need to keep doing it, but it will speed it up.īut I have to move on to the thorny issue of pre-stretching strings. Giving it 15 minutes a day will mean the strings may take weeks to settle! I personally recommend some good hard fast strumming for about 30 minutes (treat it as practice time!) and keep tuning as you go. How long it will take will depend on how much you play it.

This allows the strings to stretch naturally through the action of the vibration they were designed to deal with. There are lots of conflicting theories as to how to speed this up, but for me, the only sensible way to do this is to just keep playing and keep tuning. Frustrating for a beginner, sure, but perfectly normal! So you tune up again, and sure enough they stretch again. This is the natural stretching of the string. If you put a new set of strings on a ukulele and tune them to pitch, they will go out of tune very quickly. Strings made of nylon or fluorocarbon DO stretch over time, and keep stretching until they reach a point where they stabilise. This is perfectly normal and something you will have to deal with - simple as that. The most common gripe with a ukulele losing tuning is in the strings stretching, or rather with NEW strings stretching. So lets get back to the root causes here - and remember - these can affect any instrument, good, bad, cheap, expensive! Yet still I see that being trotted out with recommendations for instruments every day. In most cases it means something needs to settle or get adjusted. Holding tuning is not the mark of a good ukulele per-se and slipping tuning doesn't mean your ukulele is bad.

Saying to someone that 'this one holds tuning' as a recommendation that it is in some way a 'good' ukulele and not bad is completely flawed and fails to address what the actual issues could be. ALL ukuleles can be set up to hold tuning and ANY ukulele (even a $3000 plus model) can have tuning that slips (if the setup is wrong!). What? You are recommending a ukulele purchase based on the fact that yours holds tuning and some others don't?

Pitch ukulele tuner online