My thoughts on classical nylon and hybrid strings

Warning! Do not read this if you are not a guitarist! If you are still reading, you have either too much time on your hands, have the curiosity of a cat (and look what happens to the majority of them when they encounter traffic), or you are indeed a guitarist.

Stumble into most guitar shops, gaze at the multitude of strings, ask the bloke behind the counter what do I need, and said shop assistant picks the one that makes him the most profit! If you are not happy with being flogged any old bit of cat-gut then you will no doubt ask around and thus enter the 'what string is best' debate. This has always been a hot if somewhat geek-like topic I'm afraid, and as any decent Englishman would do I can only apologize. John Williams mutters 'nylon ones' when asked this question of what strings he uses. Despite this, the subject of strings is still worth a mention without taking it to the geek train-spotter extreme.

To add to the context, I'm a classical player using concert guitars by Manuel Contreras II and Stephen Hill, plus I play a Godin Grand Concert-midi with synth access when I get bored of the same-old-usual. Using D'Addario EJ46's [sorry-1 to get geekish so early] I found myself with severe intonation problems with the Contreras, and had Contreras Jnr. look at it. I'd happy memories of using Augustine Imperial Blues in my early student days only later switching to D'Addario EJ46's in a quest for more tension on an old Asturias guitar. He suggested trying D'Addario EJ46's (high tension) on the bass and Savarez Alliance (normal tension) on the trebles. I stuck with this choice, mainly because I bought several hundred sets off of this nice chap, although unfortunately the intonation kept getting worse. Later, Stephen Hill looked at the Contreras guitar, swore that there is nothing wrong with the string length (and I believe him!) and suggested using mixtures of strings to compensate for the problems. So he advised putting an EJ45 medium D'Addario on the 1st string, a medium Savarez Alliance red on the second string and any choice of bass strings. He prefers Savarez Crystal Blue (Hard) or Luthier medium-hard's on his own guitars. The idea that thicker and thinner strings promote a slightly different string length and hence can alter the intonation. I find the Luthiers break up and become scratchy on the trebles. The Crystal blues are frankly boring, although I do use these on the Hill guitar and they are good but not great - but I long for a change as I hate compromise!

Unlike classicals which have a fixed bridge, Les Paul Electric guitars have a 'tunomatic' bridge with saddles that you can alter the string length with screw driver. I often look at new electric guitars and inspect the bridge - if all the
tunomatics are roughly in the middle of the bridge there may have been less cock-ups than those with wildly differing saddles: after all, it may leave you no room for adjustment if the guitar changes, which it no doubt will.

With regards to string breakages, I experimented with La Bella Professional Series classic strings, but found that the basses broke overnight for no apparent reason!

A few die-hards use extra hard tension D'Addario's. I tried extra hards on the bass side a while back when playing a particular Turkish/Italian piece called Koyunbaba (Domeniconi) that requires re-tuning the guitar to C-sharp minor: thus the sixth string drops to a C-sharp, the 5th to G-sharp, and 4th to Csharp. Some players say that the extra-hards work well on the Godin Grand Concert, although I suspect that the G 3rd will be on the tubby side (and the EJ46 is certainly that so things may only get worse!). These extra hards (bass side only) ended up being put on a spare guitar where I experimented with 'Nashville' tuning with extra light gauge strings on the treble side (tuned one octave up).

My conclusion is that string choice evolves and yet never reaches any sensible conclusions. Factors such as string action, various tensions of the woods that slacken over a lifespan may mean (and this was certainly the case with my cheap Asturias student guitar) that one set of strings used in the first few years of a given guitars life may not be 'the' choice when the guitar matures.

I hope this helps you. Now I'm off to find my cat...

DH

P.S. I'm informed by The Lute Society that they have much bigger problems than us guitarists when it comes to strings.