String Guage

[mirth]

That does look cool.

[dasein]

It wouldn't be the best slide for traditional Delta blues playing and the like, but for single lines on an electric it's perfect.

[aliensporebomb]

I had .013s on my Jackson Soloist for years. Slowly went from that to .011s, then .010s for quite a long period. Now on that guitar I'm at .009 and a half gauge on that one and will eventually settle at 9.

The proprietor at the store who sold it did that as a joke but it added mega-tuning stability and it also made for fearless bending but I this it didn't do the neck any favors (it's neckthru). Slowly going down in gauge has seemingly made it happier.

As far as the rest of the guitars, they're all .009-.042 I suspect. I sometimes go up to .010 but it's now .009 across the board.

As far as the acoustics, that's something like .013s and the six string bass, it's whatever telephone poles were on it when it shipped.

[mirth]

Jun 14, 2012 16:03:06 GMT -5 Infinite Ego said:

Jun 14, 2012 16:02:03 GMT -5 mirth said:

I don't know, I pick hard, so anything less than 10s and I'm breaking strings. haha.

Right. But country style claw and hammer, and all that, is actually a very light touch. I can see why you'd go for the larger strings...just saying

IE you'd be surprised how much this little conversation has got me thinking about stuff. After contemplating what you said about about light touch it got me thinking about subtleties more. To the point I've switched over to 9 to 46s on my main guitar and have really been trying to think about a lot of this stuff.

I noticed with the larger strings you can pull off anything still but it's a lot harder and not as consistent. By lightening my touch across the board I'm able to grab a lot more sounds. It takes a lot more control but I like where it's heading. By using a lighter string I have to pick softer which allows for my picking and legato to be the same volume. It also allows for things like banjo rolls to come out better and just playing with my thumb to sound more even.

So for the last month I've been really trying to get more control over the whole sound of each string and each note (especially with vibrato). I also noticed I was pretty much not bending at all and really lost of lot of my touch for it. So that's been interesting as well.

This is all part of my "jazz" guitar school de-programming period. I can't believe how many lessons I buried because of music school. It might have just been my teachers but I have spent the last couple years trying to forget all that stuff to start playing music again. Amazing how that school of thought is so much more about what notes to play; as opposed to what each note should sound like. The rock school isn't necessarily better but there are exceptions (jeff beck).

Just wanted to give credit where credit is due. Thanks for making me question my playing even more than the sadistic way I already do j/k haha.


....FYI sorry for the lack of commas (the button is not working on my keyboard)

[Infinite Ego]

That's very cool. It's funny how everybody in a group of musicians finds themselves at various points in the technical and mechanical arc. There is no one best place to be on that arc but important that at each point we learn what we can learn from that position.

Important to me was country guitar (technique and gear). I don't want to play country guitar per se but the style itself is amazing. Hard to believe a bunch of hillbilly morons (kidding) could invent something so melodic and technically accomplished.