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comment by cgod
cgod  ·  4272 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Concerning the third (G) string of the electric guitar...
I used to play with a wound G string on my electric. I already played very heavy strings and tried it a few times. In the end the heaviest unwound string that I could buy satisfied me tonally. The only reason I played big fat strings was for the tone.

I also pinned my whammy bar by hammering a piece of wood into the bottom of the bending mechanism, whammies steal tone, and if you don't use em often or at all it's worth pinning em down. A nice chunk of wood will transfer tone to the body of the guitar when it's holding the bridge whammy mechanism down.





Tumbledown  ·  4095 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I play a Fender Jaguar, and have the stock bridge on it. I can't really use light gauge strings on it because the low break angle from the tailpiece, combined with the lower tension from the strings makes the strings pop out of the saddles with hardly an aggressive strum.

However, the low-tension bridge design, along with the short scale neck allows .012's to feel as easy to bend as .010's on, say, a telecaster/les paul. There's something oddly charismatic about being able to do bends easily with flatwound strings.

JakobVirgil  ·  4272 days ago  ·  link  ·  
I used to use rusty bailing wire on my elecric bass the high iron content made it punchy indeed. But it kept blowing my amp.

now I only play acoustic banjo and 12 and 6 strings. I find that on the guitars I like thin strings play really loose. on the 6-string I use the thin string from a pack of twelves apearently not an uncommon practice for folk and old time country musicians.

on the banjo I have a wound Electric bass G-string and two banjo strings I play with a bow so I am doing everything wrong [t]here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgu5AW9q8pI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wjOW0wVjGc

cgod  ·  4271 days ago  ·  link  ·  
well I don't know if you are doing it wrong but you are doing it strange, carry on with your bowed banjo!