Locking tuners

If you are having tune instability issues with your guitar, you may want to check out your tuners, especially if your guitar is in the < $200-300 MSRP range (if you are above that mark it is reasonable to believe that your tuners will be of slightly better quality).

You can easily change your tuners to locking tuners, which have a locking wheel underneath. When you turn the wheel, the peg bites into the string and locks it into position. Because the string is locked, there's no need to wrap the string around the peg. Because there is no wrap, it is a lot harder to misjudge how much you are tightening the string, which means less chances of accidentally breaking the string. And because it is locked in place, there's no slip, so you will have better tune stability, you will still have to account for string stretching, humidity, etc. but at least your string length will be constant.

A good quality set of these locking tuners will run around $50-60. You can go under $20 if you go the eBay Chinesium route, which is a gamble. Plus it's dangerous, you are trusting that the Chinesium won't fall apart and the string take your eye out.

The D'Addario Planet Waves tuners I discuss below were $50 on eBay Amazon. The Hipshop tuners were $62 on eBay, and dropped to $55 about 5 minutes after I finished installing them on my Affinity Telecaster. Oh, and there's a left handed tax, the right-hand versions were all listed $3 or so cheaper.

I switched the tuners on my Donner acoustic with Planet Waves locking auto-trimming tuners. I am very happy with the results:



And yes, I had to drill holes, but on this cheapo guitar I don't care. It was a great quality of life upgrade, it gave me much better tune stability, and changing strings now takes me a few minutes instead of half an hour.

I wanted to do the same with my Affinity Telecaster, but couldn't find a lefty set so I had to opt for Hipshot locking tuners:





Same benefit as with the Planet Waves, but no auto-trim. Auto-trim is just a parlor trick, the Hip Shots grab as strongly as the Planet Waves, so I was able to trim the string ends very close. I could have gone closer, but this was the existing set of strings since I was learning how to set them up, later I'll swap them for a fresh set and I'll trim them closer. As for installation, these came with universal mounting plates, so I did not need to drill holes.

Update: 1/17/2020 I switched the Telecaster to Ernie Ball super slinky 009-042s, both the string change and the tuning were absolutely painless.

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