- Acquire a bass. Ideally the bass should be either the acoustic variety, the upright variety, or the electric variety, but it should not be the aquatic variety. If you acquired your bass by pulling it out of a body of water, it is probably the wrong sort of bass, and you should take your searching farther inland.
- Acquire one or more string suitable for installation on a bass. These are found through vendors of musical instrument supplies, either as a single string or a matched set of four strings. If you've never done this before, or you are making the purchase on behalf of a child learner, go for something inexpensive.
- Acquire eye protection. If you already wear spectacles to correct your vision, get additional eye protection to layer over them. Bass strings are capable of inflicting remarkable damage to eyes and eyeglasses, with devastating suddenness, if you should happen to offend their sensibilities or breathe on them wrong.
- Look to the machine head of your bass, where are found its tuning pegs. One direction of rotation of a peg causes a string to become tighter, which may provoke the string to snap violently in an attempt to deprive you of your eyes. Identify which direction that is, and do not turn the peg that way. You will need to figure out which direction for yourself, because the usual "righty tighty, lefty loosey" rule does not apply: the last person who strung your bass may have been a dumbass, and many tuning pegs allow tightening in either direction. The other direction of rotation loosens the string. Turn the peg in the loosening direction, as many times as it takes to fully unwind the old string. Once the string is loose from the machine head, you can also unhook its opposite end from the pin that restrains it.
- Select the bass string you wish to install. Make sure it is the correct string for the job; a bass has four strings customarily tuned to the pitches E1 (41.2 Hz), A1 (55 Hz), D2 (73.4 Hz) and G2 (99 Hz). If you are facing the bass with its machine head oriented upright, the E string is the one farthest to the left, and will produce the lowest sound. The G string is the one farthest to the right, and will produce the highest sound. If the musician playing the bass is left-handed, they might reverse the sequence, but it is better to use a bass specifically built for left-handed tuning, if so, due to basses having construction which reinforces certain areas to support higher tension than others. If you are installing all four strings, start with the lowest, and work your way up to the highest. Do each string one by one: remove one old string and replace it with a new string. Then remove the second old string, and replace it. Do not remove all four strings at the same time, before replacing the first new string. While this will not break anything (usually), it does elevate the difficulty of tuning the instrument without snapping any strings later.
- One end of your selected string should feature a loop of wire. Wrap this loop over the pin or hook at the tail end of the bass, and stretch the string up toward the machine head, passing the unlooped end through the hole in its corresponding tuning peg. Select which direction you wish to be the "tighter" direction for all of your tuning pegs, and turn the peg in that direction to tighten the string, until it is no longer slack. At this stage, do not fully tighten the string to its final tuned pitch. At the machine head, make sure there are no sharp wire ends sticking out where they could cut your hand easily. If any sharp ends are sticking out, carefully use wire-cutters to trim the ends, or use needle nose pliers to twist and crimp the end so that it no longer presents a sharp point.
- Repeat the above step until all four strings are installed and have the slack fully taken out of them. Once all four strings are physically in place, you may begin tuning them. Do not attempt to tune any single string all at once. Instead, incrementally tighten each of the strings, one by one, starting with the lowest and progressing toward the highest string. E-A-D-G, E-A-D-G, over and over tighten each string by a small amount. Every time one string tightens, it is going to cause its neighbours to lose a miniscule amount of tension, and the strings and neck of the instrument need this gradual process to adapt to each other's exertions of force. Eventually you will have all four strings tightened to the correct pitch. I recommend using an electronic tuner (which may be a separate device, or may be a mobile app on your cellular phone) to get the right pitch.
- Place the bass in a dry, climate-controlled location, or back in its case in a room which is not especially hot or cold. Leave it undisturbed for at least an hour, and then return to it. At least one string is likely to have slackened enough to be audibly flat, by the time you return. Re-tune any strings that have become detuned, remembering to wear eye protection as you do. Your bass is now ready to play, and it should remain mostly in tune (needing only tiny adjustments right before every practice session or performance) for the usable lifespan of the strings you just installed, provided you do not move it to a very hot or cold location. Significant temperature changes will cause the metal of the strings to expand or contract unevenly, requiring re-tuning them.
Oh no! The bridge on my upright bass has violently ejected itself!
Do not panic! It probably sounded like a shotgun blast very close to your ear, and the bridge is probably all the way across the room from you. This happens from time to time. Retrieve the bridge, slacken all four strings, and carefully re-seat the bridge. Tighten the strings just enough to take the slack out and secure the bridge into position, and then tune the strings as you always would. Do not, under any circumstance, use adhesive to secure the bridge. Bridges are important to transmit sound from the strings to the resonating chamber inside the bass, but the bridge is also a failsafe device to protect the neck of the bass against damage from unevenly tightened strings. If the bridge ejects, be pleased, because it has successfully protected your bass from invisible but significant structural damage. If the bridge snaps apart, be especially pleased, because you only need to buy a new bridge, and not an entire new bass.
My music teacher taught me to do all of this a different way!
Then do as directed by your teacher. There are other approaches to string changing and tuning that work well enough. The method I have given here is intended to minimise risk of injury and damage to your instrument, at the expense of being very slow compared to other methods. Professional luthiers and bassists will typically use expedient methods, and will also typically tune by ear instead of with a tuner, but they have easy access to as many replacement strings as they could want, and they have the experience to sense when a string is about to snap. Being slow and careful saves you money on spare strings, by avoiding breakage, and it allows you to gradually develop the kind of sensitivity to a string's tension that a professional performer uses every time they tune up. Consider this approach to be a foundation you may use to gain more refined skills later. One of the more expedient methods is to tune from the middle strings outward, rather than from low to high: A-D-E-G. An advantage of this approach is that the change in sequence will change how each string causes its neighbours to slacken, in a useful manner that reduces how far you have to correct the other strings when tuning them. A-D-E-G is more useful on an upright bass than on an electric bass, due to differences in how their necks are reinforced, and due to their different tuning pegs: upright basses use friction-fit tuning pegs, while electric basses use tuning pegs with threaded screws.
What about tuning a guitar?
These same principles can be applied for tuning a violin, guitar, cello, mandolin, ukulele, or other stringed instrument with a neck. Every instrument tunes to different frequencies for the strings, so you must not use guitar strings on a violin, nor any other combination of strings with the wrong instrument: this risks damaging your instrument by applying excess pressure to the neck. Be advised that nylon strings are every bit as able to put out your eyes, as metal strings, and do not shirk wearing eye protection, just because you opted into a string that seems less pointy on the end. Harps and pianos also use strings and tuning pegs, but the process to tune them is much more involved due to the sheer number of strings.
Stay safe, be patient, and good luck in your music education!
Iron Noder 2024, 02/30