While many of us agonise at length about what the perfect set of pickups for our or 335 might be, fewer devote the same amount of deliberation to strings. This is a bit unfair, I think, as not only do strings influence the tone of our guitars more than we give them credit for, but they’re also our tactile interface with the instrument. Looked at that way, we should be treating them like tone-making royalty and, crucially, trying out different makes, types and gauges of string – not so we can select one and have done with it for the rest of our lives, but to find the set that best fits each guitar we own.
At the very least, we owe it to ourselves to find strings that work for who we are as players, says veteran string-maker Curt Mangan, who produces some of the best strings made today, from his workshop in Cortez, Colorado. “First off, every player is unique in how they will make a string vibrate,” Curt observes. “Their ‘attack’ has a huge effect on the resulting tone both electric and acoustic.
The old saying, ‘It’s all in the fingers’ is, in my opinion, 100 per cent correct. I was once in a room with three well-known guitarists all playing the same guitar through the same . The differences in the tonal responses from each player were remarkable.
“So, there is no right or wrong choice in the strings a player selects,” he continues. “They must find strings that match the tone and feel they want. There is no one-size-fits-all.
But the good news is, tod.
