Settling the strings down..

Hey

So I finally got my new strings on to my stratocaster.. anyway, I read on this site somewhere that one of the instructors uses a .20 unwound string for the D (3rd) string, so I tried it.. only problem is, the string is taking AAAGGGESS to settle down.. every time I tune it, it's out of tune less than a minute later. I've tried stretching the strings, like I always do with new strings and it works for the other strings but not this one.

Is there something extra I need to do with this string, since it's unwound etc?

What about intonation? how important is that? I noticed a few of the strings now are a little sharp on the 12th fret but not by much... is it worth fiddling around with the intonation, with the potential of messing it up, to get it close-to perfect? The intonation tutorial looks easy enough.. but yeh..

Once its streched nd you've played it for a half hour, it shouldn't go anywhere unless your doing some harsh bends. The only thing I can think of is that you don't have enough string wrapped around the tuning post and its slipping. I had that problem with the 1st string on my 1st guitar if I didn't wrap enough around.

Yeh, at first most of the strings did the slipping thing, but I stretched them (wobbled them left to right) as I tightened them to stop that from happening and that worked.

Having played for a little while, I am starting to see the problem. When I have the 3rd string in tune as an open note (I am using a digital tuner) it plays flat when I fret the string... like say I play a basic A-shape, the string is VERY flat and sounds awful. However, when I play a basic D-shape it is fine because the 3rd string is being played open and not fretted.

I started to use different amounts of pressure to hold down the string on the 2nd fret, and moved it back and forward within the fret space while holding the string down. The amount of variation in pitch is huge.... I'm starting to think that having a .20 unwound string as the 3rd just isn't going to work on this guitar... it's just too malleable/bendy and is too easily affected by the positioning of the finger when fretted.

Before I owned this strat guitar I had a epiphone gibson SG (which I still have), so restringing is very different for that one.. just finding so many little things that can go wrong with the restringing process and not finding many answers to them... the restringing guides on this site all assume that it's a perfect world and nothing goes wrong during the stringing process..

Should I just go back to the wound string? It's a .26 in this gauge set I am using (ie. 9, 11, 16, 26, 36, 46).. having .20 as the third doesn't seem that much of a difference.. but since it's unwound it appears to be making a huge impact.

Ohhh! *slaps self in the head.* I shoulda realized when you said you changed string thickness before. Since your using a different string on the G, you threw off the intonation, which is having the open g in tune with the g at the 12th fret.

http://www.fretnotguitarrepair.com/intonation.htm

So I am following the intonation lesson on the site and I am wondering why my intonation is so far out. I haven't finished the intonation yet but so far I've had to move the 6th, 5th and 4th string's intonation almost all the way back. On the lesson he doesn't move the saddles very far at all. Am I doing it right?

I've also noticed that it depends alot on how hard you press down when you play the note at the 12th fret. If I hold the string down lightly it's flatter than when I hold it down hard. How hard should I be pressing down when playing the 12th fret to see if the intonation is set correctly?

To set it correctly you would press down as you would normally to play. Unless you want to press down hard all th time, then it'd be kinda pointless. See what I'm saying?

That's what I was doing but it means that I would have to wind the intonation saddles back further than they will go. Just to clarify, it is the D string (the 4th I suppose) that I have the unwound string on.