FAQS & TIPS

Notes on Strings

All of the beautiful wood and tedious fretwork and careful shaping and bracing on a guitar serve only one purpose, to amplify the vibrations of the strings. Any guitarist can tell you that a new set of strings will make a guitar that sounds dead and flat come alive. A guitar that plays out of tune can often be remedied by the application of new strings. They can comletely alter the way a guitar sounds and feels. If you are not entirely happy with your guitar you may want to consider trying a different type of string before going to the expense of buying a new guitar or replacing the pickups. The vibration of the string is where the sound begins.

The most common problem with a guitar that does not have good tone and does not play well and/or will not stay in tune is old strings. Strings that are oxidized or dirty or tarnished will not stay in tune, will not have good tone and they have got to be changed before any other diagnoses is done. How often you should change strings depends on several factors. How often do you play? When you play, do your hands sweat? How corrosive is your sweat? Where is your guitar stored? What kind of alloy are your strings made of? There is no standard period of time that a set of strings should last. Just because the guitar is new does not mean the strings qualify as new and just because you changed the strings last month does not mean your strings are new. Even a brand new set of strings just out of the package can have one or more bad strings that do not perform properly.

There is another very common problem that people run into concerning strings. They install fresh new strings straight out of the box and the guitar still will not stay in tune. A logical assumption is that the tuners are slipping. That is almost never what is happening. The usual reason the guitar will not stay in tune is because they did not stretch the strings after installing them. This can be confirmed by pulling up on the low E-string at about the 12th fret and seeing if the pitch drops a step or two. When new strings are installed, the part of the string wound around the tuner must be tightened until the string no longer goes flat when you give it a yank. To do this, the string must be pulled and retuned, then pulled and retuned, then pulled and retuned, etc... until pulling on the string makes no difference in the pitch. Always pull the string with moderate pressure away from the fretboard and not in a diagonal direction to avoid damaging the nut. If you fail to do this when you put on new strings, then every time you play your guitar you will be tightening the windings around the tuners and causing the string to go flat. It will be long past time to change your strings again before the windings settle in. When installing strings, Leave just enough slack to make three or four wraps around the tuners. Too much string wrapped around the tuners will make it very difficult to get your strings properly stretched.

String Mechanics

A guitar string has two parts: the core and the winding. The core is either round or hexagonal. The winding is wrapped around the core and may have one of three different shapes: round-wound, half-round or flatwound. Most people use round-wound strings. Round-wound strings have a very clean and bright sound. Half-round strings start out as round-wound but they are then ground or burnished to give a flatter, smoother surface. Half-round strings are not as bright sounding as round-wound strings but the smoother surface allows the fingers to glide more freely with less squeaking. Flat-wound strings have a very smooth outer surface and allow the fingers to glide with no squeaking at all. Jazz and blues players often use flat-wound strings. They have a very dark and mellow sound.

Another factor which has a great effect on a strings tone is the metal alloy it is made from. Metal used in electric guitar strings must have strong magnetic properties in order to interact with the guitars pickups. Strings made for acoustic guitars do not need these magnetic properties because the tone is not produced electrically. However, they do require high resonance in order to project the tone through the wood of the guitar. Nickel plated steel has excellent magnetic properties and is very good for electric guitars. It has a bright, warm sound. Pure nickel was popular during the sixties and has a smoother tone than nickel plated steel does. Stainless steel has a very bright and clear tone and is popularly used on electric guitars. It has the advantage of being much more corrosion resistant than nickel strings. Chrome is used usually in flatwound strings and is favored by jazz and blues players. The alloy usually used for acoustic guitar strings is bronze, which produces a bright and crisp sound. also commonly used is phosphor bronze. It has a little bit warmer, mellower sound than bronze. Brass is also used but not as often as the others. It has a very metallic and bright sound. It can be used on flat sounding acoustic guitars to brighten up the sound.

There is yet another factor which effects the tone of strings, that is the thickness, or gauge, of the string. String thickness is measured in 1/1000th of an inch. Thicker strings are harder to play on because they have more tension and are harder to press down. Because they have more tension, they are also harder on the guitar neck and bridge. If you go to a thicker string, the setup of your guitar may have to be changed to accomodate them, especially if your guitar has a tremolo lever or whammy bar. They have the advantage of a better tone than thinner strings.

As you can see, The strings are the sound generating part of a guitar. The rest of the instrument serves to transmit that sound in an audibly pleasing and accurate manner. There are a lot more factors that come into play in addition to the strings, but the sound begins with the vibration of the strings. In future articles, I hope to shed some light on what the other components of a guitar do. I also hope to write about other instruments and how they work and how to maintain them. Tune in again!