String explorer

Tannin

^ On my list @NicoAdie I'm a bit hesitant to try the titanium ones - so crazy expensive! - but at half that price the Kovars are certainly on my radar.

guitarjack66

Just while on the subject of strings. I bought a set of Martins to go on my concert as the high e snapped a few weeks back. The sp.
tools I have are cheap and space limited so its a pain doing it. I managed to put them on and tune them ok after my usual struggle. I always leave them a bit long and snip the ends when done. So I am snipping away and 'ping' goes the b string as instead of the leftover being snipped I snipped the actual bloody string! In my defence both the string and the tuning peg where you insert the string through the hole are silver in my case. Serves me right for being a pillock and more short sighted than I thought.

Soupman

Been there, read the book, got the Tee shirt..,

Tannin

Guess how I broke this one:   

sev112

What on earth is that ?

Tannin

Hmmmm .... well, probably not a clove hitch or a bowline, and I don't think it's a hangman's noose .... possibly a mutated granny knot?

Tannin

Unless you mean the guitar, of course. It is a Tacoma Thunderhawk baritone, as pictured on bottom left. 

KevS

This should be pinned up at the top really..This is an interesting resource..If it was the consensus of a few people,,maybe even better..For Example...This type of string is crap,but for some reason are brilliant on this one guitar..Crap on the rest type of thing..I had no idea you had tried all of these strings..I've been on here a few years now..

Tannin

Cheers @KevS and thanks!

I can't see a consensus listing being practical. There are just so many variables; we all play different guitars with different techniques and different styles of music. A string I love, you might hate. Come to that, strings I love on one guitar can sound awful on another one.

However I see no reason why other members shouldn't post their own string journals. I'd never thought of keeping notes about strings until a member on another forum suggested it, but I found it very valuable having made-at-the-time notes  to look back on and .... well, one thing led to another and now I've almost run out of untried brands to play with. 

guitarjack66

I am going from .10 gauge up to .12 gauge on a couple of guitars just to see how I get on. The concert (mentioned above) is one. I am just sering if it helps with the action a touch on a smaller body.

KevS

Could you perhaps tell me what other strings have similar tension and tone as Martin original 80/20 Bronze in the purple and white pack. ?.They aren't as common as the other Martin strings in the UK.. The D'Addario Phosphor bronze seem to be higher tension..3 guitars have been restrung with the 80/20's..I think I am a convert..Pity I have a stash of Phosphor Bronze D'Addarios,both coated and uncoated...Maybe good for bassier guitars..

Tannin

Update today, as always via edits to the original posts.

In no particular order, I got around to trying Galli Fingerstyle this week. These are a double-wound set. The idea with double-wound strings is that two layers of finer windings produces a smoother, tighter surface with less unwanted left-hand noise than a single coarse winding and (because there is less space between the windings to collect muck) a longer life. The downside (or upside - depends on your point of view!) is a cleaner, more sterile sound.  The Galli Fingerstyle set surprised me a little by turning out to be bluegrass gauge (12-56 instead of the usual 12-53ish) and a lot by turning out to be nickel-bronze, not the phosphor bronze I was expecting. They do have some of that flat metallic ring nickel strings are noted for, but much less than I expected. Overall they are clear with a very precise sound. 

The La Bella Gypsy Jazz strings I loved last time have an apparently identical alter-ego: La Bella Silk and Steels are made from the same materials, look identical, and come in the same very sensible 12-56 gauge. (:Sensible" in this case because silk strings tend to be very low tension and making a set a little heavier on the bottom end balances them up again. Top marks for La Bella in this regard.)  Are they the same as the Gypsy Jazz? In one word, no. At first I thought they were much inferior (at least for my purposes)  - over-mellow and rather gutless. But as they settled in (or perhaps as I became more used to them) my view moderated. They have been on for a couple of months now (admittedly with little playing time as I have been over the water on the Big Island) and are sounding very nice: full, mellow, and enough grunt to be enjoyable. (But note this is on a very lightly built and responsive instrument - not sure they'd be much fun on a typical factory guitar.) So good strings - but not a patch on those superb Gypsy Jazz La Bellas. I have ordered two sets more of the latter.

I've mentioned Philippe Bosset's superb phosphor bronze strings before, one of the three or four best strings I've ever used - mellow, subtle, and full-bodied rather than bright and loud. So I thought I'd try Philippe Bosset 80/20s for a brighter sound. They are good but perhaps not really the thing for the little Brook I tried them on - it is fussy about strings and could get a little shouty with the brass.

Mark Bass is a new marketing name for a previously obscure but long-established Italian string maker. The set I fitted to the Huon Pine Cole Clark Angel merely confirmed my view of Italian string manufacturers - i.e., that they are amongst the best  in the world. OK, the Mark Bass set is a good everyday commodity product, not a superb hand-made boutique string  from the likes of R. Cocco or Dogal or Phillipe Bousset, but at £6.91 it's as good as anything else in that price range, and better than quite a few. Happy to buy more of them one day.

Now for the really weird ones: Ernie Ball Aluminum Bronze. These look weird, feel weird, and sound weird, but in their own weird way they are a good weird product. Most people won't like them but they have quite specific characteristics and if that matches what you are looking for, there isn't anything else remotely similar. 
    

Speaking of weird, DR Hi-Def Neons (above) are about as weird-looking as you can get.They feel weird too, as or more distinctive than Elixirs. But a good sound (albeit somewhat muted because of the coating - not an issue on this sometimes over-bright rosewood guitar) and once you get use to the soapiness, a great soft, flexible feel. Oh, and barely any left-hand squeal. Very reasonable at £7.95 and if you can live with the colours, well worth a try.

Finally, a hex core set from Dogal. I have a love-hate relationship with the Dogal round cores: they sound and feel absolutely wonderful but they are horribly prone to coming unravelled and going dead. Yes, round core strings can do that if you are not careful, but I am careful and I've still had two failures out of three sets. Nevertheless, I'm going to try them once again, this time with super-duper-extra precautions (I may even simply not cut the strings at all, just make little ringlets on the headstock). In the meantime, this is Dogal's hex core set (which surely should be safe enough). I fitted them to the Brook  a couple of days ago and they are settling in very nicely indeed: fairly high tension but softening nicely with use and a lovely clear, ringing tone. 

Still in the queue for testing are Patagonia GA140G 85/15s from Argentina, Fender phosphor bronze, La Bella Criterion, Cleartone EQ, Everly Acoustic Sessions, Thomastik-Infeld Spectrum, Optima Hot Club Gypsy Jazz, Black Smith Phosphor Bronze, Strings By Mail Phosphor Bronze, D'Addario XS, GHS and SIT nickels, and an assortment of flatwounds. 

Tannin

KevS said:

Could you perhaps tell me what other strings have similar tension and tone as Martin original 80/20 Bronze in the purple and white pack.

@KevS I haven't tried a lot of brass strings, but obviously the Darcos (same string, lower price, plainer packaging). Also worth a try would be John Pearse and Picato.

Working on the theory that manufacturers who make a phosphor bronze string broadly similar to the Martin phosphor bronze (which is very like the Martin brass apart from the alloy) would also stick to the same style in brass, you could try SIT,  GHS, Optima, and Pyramid. Also perhaps Curt Mangan,  Mark Bass, and maybe Ernie Ball (though I haven't tried a set of Balls in ages and my memory is a bit faded).

 

Tannin

It has been a long time since I updated this thread. No, I haven't forgotten about it, I have reasons. And if you don't like them, I have other reasons. More about that later.

Meanwhile, I got my long delayed shipment from Strings and Beyond in North Carolina today. These days for obvious reasons , I try not to order stuff from the USA anymore - for the most part I buy strings from vendors in the Netherlands or sometimes the UK, but I'm not fanatical about it and the Yanks do do some things very well, so now and then I still buy US-made strings, and/or buy from Strings and Beyond or (less often) Strings by Mail. 

For this particular order, I went mad on DR products. DR really are the hidden gem amongst US string manufacturers, with a great range of great strings, including all sorts of things nobody else makes. More on that later too.

I placed this order on 30 July. It usually takes about a month for the crappy US postal service to get stuff to Australia, sometimes a little longer, sometimes a little faster. (Mail from Ireland, the UK, or Germany gets here at least a week faster (even though it has considerably further to go) and costs, on average, half as much.) Over two months was very bad even by American standards.

By the start of October, it still hadn't arrived! So I messaged them. Matt at S&B apologised and, on investigation, concluded that my order had got mixed up with an order from another customer in Tasmania. A day or two later, he emailed to say that they had shipped a replacement. That was 8 October, and they arrived today on the 31st. 

Yep, a blunder (the only one S&B have ever made with one of my orders) but they did the right thing about it, and promptly. I'll happily order from Strings and Beyond again another time. 





^ Today's order - picture buggerised about with in post-processing in some (possibly) artistic way just because I felt like it.

As for the order itself, it contains:

* my old favourite DR Sunbeams (as usual - those are great strings on almost any instrument) 
* a set of Pyramid Phosphor Bronze, another familiar string I like a lot
* a set of the excellent SIT Royal Bronze (possibly THE best ordinary, everyday, low-to-medium price standard hex core string on the market (but Galli LS puts its hand up here, alongside one or two others)
* a set of the stupidly expensive Thomastic Infield Bronze to try out. These are the only Thomastic strings I haven't tried yet. If I am any guess, they will be similar to all the others: very good strings, a bit quirky, and wildly overpriced. I'll buy this one set, and very likely no replacements as the pricing is just too crazy-high even for me. But let's try them and see.
* No less than four sets of DR's delightfully weirdo coated strings. Three are the soft DR coating (see my remarks about DR Neons up on the first page) and should be exactly the same as Neons bar the colour. (That's the Black Beauties, Red Devils, and Dragon Skins.) The Dragon Skin Plus set (top right) cost more and apparently are a harder, longer-lasting coating, so they will be interesting. DR's website doesn't explain any of this (at least not on any page I could find) so I emailed them and they replied promptly and helpfully.

Anyway, all of these plus a variety of others from previous orders should appear here in this thread when I try them shortly. 

It's been a long time between updates, mostly because I haven't been changing strings much. I've been away a lot on the Big Island and on a wildlife photography field trip, so not playing much; I've put old favourites on several guitars (not worth writing these up just to say "these were great last time and still are"); and most of the other guitars have had (largely by chance) particularly long-lasting strings fitted. 

But nearly all of them are past their best now, so chances are I'll be putting fresh strings on seven or eight guitars over the next week or two. Anything interesting, I'll write it up. 

MSedg

Particularly interested in how the Dragon Skin + last for you Tannin - I absolutely love these strings, but they drop off a cliff after about 3 weeks for me, so too quick for a coated string given the cost.

MartinB

I like the bass version of the Black Beauties, but I'm sure the coating changes the sound - they keep some crisp, musical highs but the metallic overtones I'd expect from a fresh set of rounds are considerably reduced. 

I hadn't realised they even used the Black Beauty coating for an acoustic set, I'd anticipate they'll be at the mellow end. 

Tannin

Interesting, @MSedg. I got a good deal longer than that out of the Neons (which have a softer coating). We will see what happens with the DS+ set.

Cheers @MartinB - absolutely, the coating changes the sound. Coatings always do. Pre-coatings (i.e., most brands) generally speaking, change it a little, but don't extend life so very much. Post-coatings change the sound a fair bit (e.g., Wyres) to a lot (Elixir, DR Black Beauties). I likes the Neons (same as Black Beauties) on my Messiah which, like most rosewood guitars, needs a dash of mellowing from the strings to balance the sound up. Too bright a string makes it a bit shrill. (Depending on what sound you like, of course.) 

But how long do you get out of a set of Black Beauties on a bass? 

MartinB

Tannin said:

But how long do you get out of a set of Black Beauties on a bass? 

The current set have been on about 18 months and I'm not getting the urge to change them yet, but then I tend to like played-in roundwounds on bass. There's a little wear to the coating in the picking area, but they don't seem to go hairy like the early Elixirs did when the coating started to wear. 

Tannin

Wow! I am impressed! 

sev112

i've been trying DragonSkins this week, they seem extremely "dead" !?  Humidity has been high here and the guitar is in the case mostly but disappointed with them as i used to love Dr on electrics