ok well the strings on my guitar are gettin pretty worn and i have only had my guitar for a relativly short time and never needed to change the strings. i have a Fender Mexi-strat if thats important. my question is, what guage of strings should i get?(on the back of my guitar it tells me that i should stick w/ the fender “super bullets”) In this catalog im looking in, there are so many different thick nesses of strings i have no idea what to get. there is
Super light - .008-.038
extra light - .009-.040
light regular - .009-.046
light - .009-.042
traditional - .010-.038
regular - .010-.046
regualar heavy - .010-.052
heavy - .012-.052
now my guess would be to go with the regular. are these pretty much just a personal preference? or does it depend on the type of music u like to play? and help would be great! thanks
If you are a raw beginner you will probably want to go with a fiarly light string gauge. Extra-light to light should do it. The lighter strings will be easier on your fretting fingertips and require less picking strength. Only if you have an extreme thrash style would you want to consider medium gauge strings or above.
A handy tip I got was to restring your guitar, tune it and then let it sit overnight before playing it. It seems to allow the strings to “temper” or adjust to their tension better. Remember always to tighten your strings to their correct pitch. Loosening a string to pitch allows for more slip to occur and will make it easier for the string to go out of tune. I also recommend getting a good tuner. The Sabine models are particularly easy to use. Tuning your guitar on a routine basis is critical, especially if you intend to sing while you play. Training yourself to sing off key is worse than stupid.
Good advice from Zen; after you have played a while, you might want to try some different gauges/brands. String thickness and brand, for me, is hugely personal I have friends who wouldn’t be caught dead with my strings.
I find that if I put the new strings on, give them just a little tension, and then gently pull the string away from the body of the guitar a few times my guitar will stay in tune much better. Then I can play immediately and not have to stop to retune every few minutes…
Bass I don’t know nuttin’ about… where’s Mr.O when you need him? He plays bass…
I used to have a strat, and I used Ernie Ball Super Slinky, which is something from about .09 to .40, like your extra light. Super light is too light, at .09 you have to be careful not to bust strings, especially if you like whanging on the tremelo bar. The tremelo bar really makes it hard to keep in tune since you’re always stretching the strings. If you really want to keep in tune, you should just take off the arm and lock down the tensioning springs in the back.
Some people like a set that starts with .09, some like .10. I’d stick to light strings while you’re learning and building up calluses on your fingers.
Hey, while we’re at it, I just inherited an old cheap generic bass from my sister. It was in storage for 20 years, it should fall apart but it seems to be in ok shape considering it was a piece of crap to start with. But good enough for fooling around for me who has never played bass. So what should I do to restring this and get it in playing shape? I never restrung a bass before.
I think it generally depends on the type of music you play. If you play mostly rhythm, jazz, or blues, I’d go with a heavier gauge for a thicker, warmer tone. If, however, you want to play a lot of metal or rock solo’s I would suggest the lighter gauges. As far as keeping new strings in tune, I agree with Astroboy. Tune the string up to pitch, then tug on it(at the 12th fret)away from the neck a few times and it should drop in pitch. Repeat the process until the pitch no longer drops. I’ve also heard that dropping the string into boiling water for a few minutes will to the trick. Rock on.
As mentioned above by Zenster, lighter gauge strings are easier to play for the obvious reasons
However
Speaking in generalities, heavier gauge strings sound better. If you are playing with such a distorted tone (or at stadium-level volumes) you can negate this, but for the most part, if you want to play clean, or mildly distorted (say more of a blues-y distortion as opposed to scooped-mids metal distortion) then heavier is better. Stevie Ray Vaughn, to cite an extreme, played with a 13 on the high E. Beck and Clapton have progressed (based on interviews I have read) from 9’s to 11’s. Please note: this heavier-gauges-sound-better thing is mostly true with Strats (over,say, Les Pauls - my assumption is that the double-coil humbuckers “even out” some of the harmonic variation you’d hear from heavier gauge strings; bottom line, I don’t recall reading a lot where double-coil pickup users have commented on the need for heavier strings…). To my ear, the single-coil tones really improve with heavier gauge strings (for jazz musicians, they play with 15’s on the E and use humbuckers for the most part on their arch top hollow-bodies, but they rarely bend strings…). I play a lot of blues and can really hear the difference…
If you are going to play with heavier gauge strings, experiment for a bit and decide what gauge you are going to use, then you HAVE to re-set-up your guitar. The positioning of the individual bridge pieces will have to be adjusted - heavier gauge strings require different compensation. Also, you may need to have the neck adjusted, to counteract the pull of heavier strings or just to reduce buzz…
Most experts recommend pre-stretching, as Astroboy suggested. The strings will stretch, even if you let them sit overnight with tension. Also, some pulling force is necessary to insure the string is properly seated on the peg. Pre-stretching is particularly important if you do a lot of bends or use the whammy bar frequently.
Well, if you want to bend notes with your fingers, you should go for a light gauge strings; otherwise, you might have trouble raising that D to an E (for example). Of course, as you finger strength increases, you can movie up to heavier strings.
On the other hand, if you’re not into lead guitar playing (which uses lots of bends and vibrato for expressiveness), but are planning a windmill-style of power chords (a al Pete Townshend), you better buy heavy strings if you don’t want them to break right away.
I heard of the boiling water trick as a way of restoring the sound of old strings (oddly enough, from the WSJ). I think the idea was to get rid of all of the oils and crud that builds up on them. I tried it once back in college and it seemed to work. Now that I have a job, its easier to just replace them.
IIRC, Eddie Van Halen was the first guy to popularize the whole concept of boiling strings for 20 minutes (again IIRC from an old Guitar Player article) to stretch 'em out. It was right when he got a Floyd Rose locking system.
The biggest issue is that if he did in fact do that, how often did he need to change the strings? Things are different when you have a guitar tech and change strings every day (except in the studio - for some reason, I remember him saying that he thought dead strings sounded better for studio work…).
If you have a non-locking tremolo on your Mexi-Strat, and don’t want to have to change your strings more often than you have to, I would probably recommend against boiling the strings - a simple stretch-out when you are putting them on and a retune once or twice over the next few days should be sufficient.
Jeez, i don’t know the precise terms, but you know the strat design has a bridge that rotates into the body of the guitar, you open a little plate in the back and there are springs that pull the bridge back into position. You can remove the springs completely and the bridge on the opposite side will lock up. There are other, more proper ways to to lock it down but you should probably consult a guitar pro. Of course this means you get no action from the tremelo bar at all. I dunno, this is so hard to describe without a strat and a screwdriver in front of us.
Hell, this is exactly what I hate about the strat. The bridge design is counterbalanced by springs and you just whang on it once and you’re out of tune. That’s why I gave up on Fender, I sound crappy enough that I don’t need to sound crappier by being out of tune all the time. I personally am a Gibson man.
Yeah, but I haven’t been playing long enough to speak with any authority, so I doubt that I can help you much, black455. I was really lucky, and after trying just 3 or 4 other string types, stumbled upon some strings that I love more than is natural and healthy, I suspect. FWIW, I have only fretless basses, both electric and acoustic, and the strings I like are Rotosound TruBass 88, the black nylon flatwound ones. (The core is steel, I think, so they still work with magnetic pickups.) The gauges are 65, 75, 100 and 115, which seem sort of medium-heavy to me, but the package calls them “standard.” The sound they give is dark and warm, and they feel as smooth as my wife’s–hey, stop thinking about my wife. They’re beautiful for fretless but I couldn’t say how they’d work on a fretted bass. Probably sound great, but may not be bright enough for some players, and may wear a bit faster than steel strings.
One bass used to have frets, and even then I used black nylon tapewounds (Fender 9120, gauges 58, 72, 92 and 110). Lighter gauge, not as smooth for sliding, but a lot smoother than roundwounds, and they lasted a long time.
I think most flatwound players use stainless steel or nickel, but I don’t know about that.
[sub]By the way, I was going to say hair. As smooth as my wife’s hair, which is long and black and smooth, like my bass strings. What did you think I was going to say?[/sub]
Chas.E
I have an old Kramer(wow, I remember when there was no such thing as an “old” Kramer) that has Floyd Rose locking trem. I had the same problem with the “floating” bridge. The springs in the back are designed to keep the bridge level so you can either ‘dive’ the whammy bar or pull back on it. The problem is, any time you change the strings the springs need to be adjusted as well. It’s a pretty long process because you need to string up the guitar and tune it up. See where the bridge is “floating” then adjust the springs in the back which will put the guitar out of tune. Tune it back up and repeat the process until the guitar is in tune and the bridge is level. I got tired of this and just cranked the springs down and adjusting the action to where I wanted it. Now no matter what gauge the strings are, the bridge doesnt move. On a side note, what’s great about the floyd rose is that you have to clip the ends of the string off(the end with the little ball or hoop), insert the end it into the bridge and tighten up up with an allen wrench. In the 16 yrs I’ve owned this guitar the only place a string has broken is about a quarter of an inch before the bridge. All you have to do is unwind the string off the peg a couple times, re-insert the string into the bridge and tighten it up again. You can easily make a set of strings last over a year using this tremolo system.
