I had to change the strings on my acoustic today, and I noticed something while doing it. After I replaced every string, I had to take a pair of pliers and chop off at least four or five inches from every string.
Can the length of a guitars fingerboard vary so much (the scale, I think?)? If not, why continue manufacturing strings that are so long? Wouldn’t it be both cheaper to manufacture them and easier for players to fit them if they were reduced in size by a few inches?
No solid answer here… Just another guitar player who has changed thousands of nylon and steel strings in the past.
I think it is simply to allow for different head/bridge arrangements and different stringing styles.
I like to use Savarez strings for my classical, and I am quite pleased with their length – I can thread them nicely in my own preferred fashion. With classical, there’s some leeway on how you wrap the string at the bridge as well as the tuner.
Steel string guitars all have ball ends on the strings at the bridge, so there is no variability there, but there are lots of wacky looking headstocks around – I suspect that a Strat needs a few inches more of high E string than a Les Paul since the tuners are in a straight line.
B.B. King wraps the whole darned thing up – in an interview he said something to the effect of: “They gave you all of that extra string, so why not use it?”
I think he originally got in the habit so that he could have some extra string in an emergency (perhaps to tie a knot (!) in a broken string).
In a recent Acoustic Guitar Magazine there was a new brand of guitar out there that had the strings go straight down to the bridge and then they were anchored in a semi-circle spread out across the sound board. I’m sure that’s using up a lot of the string right there. (I’ll post the brand name if I can find the mag).
My first guitar, a p.o.s. Samick that has been beaten, bruised and battered, had a pretty small snipping on the D and G strings when I was replacing strings. It’s a big honking dreadnought guitar that has a really nice bass sound to it (the longer the strings that are vibrating, the more bass and mids are sounded). Usually the only part left on the strings the way I wound them was a little bit of the coil-wrapping and then the thin part (I’m lacking words for them). For me, it’s always been easier to have longer strings as it’s easier to wind them up without playing to get it to grip in the first wind or two.
I like all the extra string? Why? Because I don’t wrap the string up, or cut it. I like to have the strings flopping all around while I play. The head of my guitar looks like Medusa.
I’d say that a lot of it has to do with scale length, and also the fact that on many floating bridge style guitars (particularly old Gretsch styles) there is a large amount of play as to where the bridge can be located, thereby affecting how much string is needed. While many guitars adjust action and intonation by raising/lowering the saddles and/or bridge, many others move the bridge towards or away from the neck to adjust the same. Longer string length could be helpful in that instance, to maintain a preferred action while tweaking intonation, for example, or to reduce fret noise while maintaining correct intonation.
Plus, as noted above, some players wrap around the post many times, while some give it a double wrap and cut it off. I would doubt this has much effect on sustain (not nearly so much as locking down your trem bridge on a strat or going to a thicker gauge string set, for example) but it might help a little bit.
When it comes down to it though, I’d guess that the manufacturers make strings for any and all types of guitars, so I guess the extra $0.0001 cent (WAG) to extend the string an extra 6 inches on average is well worth it to make their brand accessible to every guitar player and body style out there.
Picker
Former pro guitar tech/repairman
PetW
Leaving your guitar strings uncut was a fad in the mid 1960’s. I believe the Rolling Stones did this - for a while.
WAY back when, I used to do this too. (LONG before electrical connections were made as safe as they are now.) Needless to say you can cause shocks or be shocked by these strings.
Also, you can put someone’s eye out !!!
I have to call bullshit on B.B. King. I don’t think it even be possible to use all the string and stay in tune. He may wrap it around a lot but with the fairly short scale of his guitar on his E strings he would probably have to wrap it 10-14 times, most electric guitarists shoot for 2-3 on wrapped strings and 3-5 on unwrapped. At about six wraps on the low E you are going to run out of room.
And I don’t believe he still strings his guitars. I’m sure he did at one point but I bet he has a guitar tech now.
You had to call me on that one, didn’t you?
I read it in a book on guitar repair. There were a few pages on B.B. King and his “Lucille” guitar series – there were closeup photos of the whole darned string wrapped on the pegs. I think that he even quoted King as saying that he did his own guitars. It was a book I was browsing in Borders a couple of years ago, unfortunately.
I tried my best with Google and only found a few more “I’ve heard…” quotes from other bulletin boards:
Here, here, and here.
If anything, this means that I’m not the only one who believes this possible myth.
Here’s the guitar I was talking about earlier with the strings anchored around the soundboard.
Haha, being born in 1985, I had no idea. But how can a guitar string shock you? If there’s a loose electrical connection somewhere in the guitar to the point where the strings are electric, I think you’re in trouble whether or not you cut your strings (won’t you also be shocked by the string on the fretboard?) Maybe I’m completely missing something here.
There have been quite a few instances where guitarists have been severely injured or even died due to electrocution on stage. Not to say that all these injuries or deaths have occurred solely due to not cutting the strings either, though.
A couple of references for you:
Our very own Q.E.D. Speaks and this one which is a little longer and more technical.
Generally, shocks occur when
there is a loose connection in the guitar’s wiring harness and
a) the amplifier it is attached to experiences a power surge due to faulty or poor house wiring; or
b) the PA system experiences a similar surge and the guitarist happening to be touching the microphone stand or microphone.
I will attest that you can also get a nasty shock if your lips accidently touch the mic and the sound man has phantom power on while your ground lift on the amplifier is engaged. This has happened to me numerous times, and it is no fun, I’ll tell you.
Sometimes the phantom power switch has accidently been pushed, and sometimes the board needs to send the power to a condenser mic - like for drum overhead mics or something. 48 volts suddenly hitting your lips, tongue and teeth is not as pleasant as it might seem, trust me.
Okay, I was a little unclear above.
When I said
I should have stated that “when the ground loop of the wiring harness has become loose or disengaged.”
On the Stratocastor, it’s soldered to the trem spring anchor plate - the black lead that runs alongside or underneath your trem springs. You want to be very careful anytime you adjust the anchor depth or add/remove trem springs that you don’t weaken or break the solder point between the black wire and the anchor.
As for the actual electrical circuitry issues, i’ll leave that to the experts like Q.E.D.
P
Is that allowed? :eek:
Also harp strings are a foot or so to long. I just weve it arround the tuning pins, because if the string breaks at the sound board (where it comes out the little hole) I can restring it using the left over string. However mine usualy break at the bridge pin (on top on the neck) and so are usless.
Spelling and grammer subject to change without notice.
That’s hot. [/Paris Hilton]
Hijack: Anyone see the strange guitar being played in the Stevie Winwood band on Austin City Limits?