General Music Chat

LOL.

You know backin the day I read Van Halen
put new strings in his jeans pocket and
then washed them before stringing up.
DaAdarrio's starting with a 10

SO thats how Eddie got that "brown sound"

You also heard that he just left them on til they broke, but I imagine at some point Eddie didnt handle his string changes anymore, I know I wouldnt! If I were in his position.

Wasn't Cartman the only one to hit the brown note at
a Yoko concert? Or at least score it.

Acoustic guitar.
10, 15, 23, 30, 39, 47.
Completely dead-sounding in 9 days; no twang, and too much mid-range.
So then I cut the mid-range 9db, and boost the bass 3dB.
The effective result is more bass and treble.
I've gotton dozens and dozens of compliments on how "great" my guitar sounds. Heh - dead strings . . . they sound like crap w/out the equalizer.
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But you've gotta be really really careful to adjust the equalizer in tiny increments; do it wrong, and it'll sound crummy. Be VERY careful, and you can get a real kick-ass sound.
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I change strings when I need to have a good unamplified sound, or if I want to polish or clean up the guitar. I set aside 1 hour for stringing & tuning. I tune, then hit the strings hard with several chords for 5-10 seconds. Then I tune again, hit the strings, tune again.
Remember that the neck flexes a fraction, when strings are tightened or loosened. Tighten 1 string a lot, and you're effectively loosening 5 other strings . . .
Tune the guitar to perfection, play 4-5 chords . . . do that for an hour, and it settles in 'right-quick;' you won't have to do it continually for the next several days . . . just play.

You could get longer life out of your strings by switching to mediums (13, etc). 10s are fine for electric but too light for acoustic in my experience.

Speaking from recent experience I can say that playing around with multiple tunings can dramatically shorten the life spans of one's strings - lot of fun though.

Oddly, they seem to want to snap back from drop C or Drop D to natural but after a while - the alternative tuning seems to become their home and they snap back to that.

But after a a few weeks of that they don't stay in tune very darn well no matter what tuning you use.

Bass strings? I change them no and then but typically they last much longer than guitar strings. Using Ernie Ball now which last longer than Rotosound but don't have quite as much snap to them.

Talbot

Im with Jimmy on acoustics, get a fatter set of strings. I was playing acoustic shows by myself a couple of years ago, and i tend to strum too hard, I guess Im trying to get that electric sound. But I like 13s.

Electrics 10s do the trick, plus i tend to play higher gain so I can get my sound and play very lightly on the strings.

Talbot my cover band does a lot of drop Ds, but i really dont see a difference, we may go back and forth 2-3 times in a 4 hour gig.

If i break a string it tends to be the G string, I guess I bend it more than the others, next would be the high E, then its random. But I havent broken a string during a gig in a while, so Im good there.

As far as tuning unless its some temp humidity issues, all my guitars tend to stay in tune. Ive gotten my ear to the point that if one string goes out I can ussually adjust it during a song, and then double check with my tuner between songs.

Awww, JW I bet your ears are better than that tuner.

Jamming with different people, you don't need to stop and tune in between every song. Playing live you don't have that opportunity unless you want to kill the show.
Half the time its not the guitar, it's the player pulling strings out.

Every thing you play, you have to do with intonation in mind. Just listen to a jr high band compared to a high school band. They all tuned to A 440...
They also learned to adjust to make the horn section sound as good as the woodwinds.

This is where the whole string thing comes back into play, because it has a fixed intonation, and the string wear constantly changes. I hate tuners because there is no way to explain to someone that yeah your open string is matched and in tune, but when you play a triad on the 8th fret your guitar is so off because your strings are so old and your ears and talent are not good enough to compensate.

I have a tuning machine I walk around with. Its an A440 fork. God am I old fashioned.