Chapter 1 - Introduction: Guitars, Strings & Players
Chapter 1 - Introduction: Guitars, Strings & Players
Choosing the Best Strings
What are the best strings for your classical guitar? What a question! It’s habitually asked in this simplistic way almost every day on guitar blogs and in Facebook group posts. And there are as many opinions about strings as there are guitarists.
Well, sorry, but there is no perfect guitar string, just as there is no entirely perfect guitar, regardless of all the hype from makers, manufacturers, and retailers. And there is no perfect guitarist—even virtuoso players continually struggle to refine their playing!
To be fair on strings, the more realistic question needs to be something like:
“What are the strings that provide the optimum sound quality and playability in relation to the qualities of the instrument I’m using at the moment and in relation to my playing style and technical abilities?”
Of course, other very practical criteria are important, such as cost, intonation, lifespan of strings, and the length of time to settle into tune. However, the sound is most important as the ultimate objective.
The Challenge of Writing About Strings
This article about strings is something of a partner piece to one I wrote for the GuitarsOnline website some years ago titled “The Eternal Quest for the ‘Right’ Guitar”. But I confess that this is a far more daunting task because many players have firm preferences and loyalties about the brands and types of strings they use, and I’m sure many will disagree with my judgments.
Primarily, this is an effort to make some sense of my own experiences with strings and guitars. It’s a story marked equally by triumph and exaltation, frustration, and disappointment. That story is represented by two boxes in my music room containing 70 packs of classical guitar strings representing about 18 brands of varying ages and in different states of completeness. I’ll return to the contents of those two boxes later.
For now, in this intro, I’ll summarize a few main points that I follow up in more detail in the later sections. Also, it might be of some comfort to know that the same issues are faced by players of all plucked and bowed string instruments.
The Importance of Tone
Let me state my own home-truth and put the issue of string choices into a vital context: playing classical guitar effectively and well depends on many interacting skills, but ultimately it is “all about tone,” and creating that tone is the player’s responsibility.
A great guitar and great strings help, but a crappy player will always sound crappy. Given that responsibility, the more ambitious a guitar player becomes, the more thoughtfully they will connect with their instrument and its important components (just like a sax player will think about mouthpiece and reed or a violinist their bow).
Guitar players aim for what every other musician aims for with their instrument: to achieve the optimum tonal range, sound textures, and sound projection that suit their chosen genre of music—in short, to shape their musical “voice” through the instrument.
In this life-long challenge, there is a dynamic three-way connection between a player’s level of technique and control, the quality of their guitar, and the strings. Learning about strings and their behavior is part of the whole package of studying the instrument over time.
Terminology and Types of Guitars
On a matter of terminology, how do we describe those guitars that used to be so confidently defined by their string material—“Nylon-string guitars”? This was a catch-all term that encompassed a recognizable form of guitar distinguished from its steel-string sibling by virtue of its construction, but mainly its tone, and ultimately its string material of nylon.
Of course, gut strings defined the instrument for over two hundred years prior to the advent of nylon strings in the late 1940s, but since then, nylon has predominated and gut has been relegated to an expensive boutique choice for purists.
However, over the past 30 years, new string materials like fluorocarbon and “Titanium” seem to now make the title “nylon-string guitar” a bit questionable. A common alternative name with unfortunate snobbish overtones is “classical guitar,” which implies that this kind of guitar is used only for performing classical concert repertoire, which is obviously not the case (it replaced the title “Spanish guitar” from the mid-1950s following the success of the movement pioneered by Andres Segovia to make the guitar a respectable concert solo instrument).
Anyway, in this discussion, I’ve decided to use the name “Classical Guitar” to refer to the instrument itself and not necessarily the many genres/styles used by its players—though some of the tonal preferences I talk about will be particularly relevant to the conventional classical concert repertoire.
Of course, there is the important topic of the Flamenco guitar and its strings, but this is a specialized topic outside my area because of the distinctive tonal priorities of Flamenco guitarists and their musical genre. On this, there are some useful discussions elsewhere.
Key Takeaway Points
This is not a quick guide to choosing classical guitar strings or brands. If the reader wants that, then it’s easy enough to find basic information and opinions on YouTube clips or websites (such as Tonebase, for example), including a lot of simplistic marketing propaganda from various string companies and stores.
But for those who prefer not to read further into these ruminations, here are my key takeaway points about finding the “right” strings for your guitar:
You can be as active or indifferent as you want about string choices; everything depends on your expectations and energy—changing strings is BORING!
Different guitars respond to strings differently: there is no “one brand/gauge/tension fits all” in the strings-guitar-player relationship.
“High Tension,” “Mid-high tension,” “Medium/normal Tension” often vary between string brands. So be careful!
As with guitars, it is absolutely critical to test strings on your guitar in the best acoustic environment possible (ideally an uncluttered room/space with timber floor) before judging them.
Benefit from direct advice from players who are better than you or teachers.
Marketing spin from string companies and intermediaries is just that—spin. Similarly, YouTube reviews and promotions can never be entirely reliable because of sound manipulation. LESSON: TRUST YOUR OWN EAR directly with the strings.
There are no guarantees that one brand of strings will work on your guitar better than any other, except that: As with guitars, with strings you generally get what you pay for. Cheap strings are generally inferior strings; there are reasons for the pricing levels. So, “Student strings” (marketed by D’Addario and other companies) are named like that because, just like “Student Guitars,” they are cheap and inferior.
The metal-head in the local guitar shop may be brilliant with distortion pedals on his Fender Stratocaster but is no expert when he hands you a pack of classical guitar strings and says: “this brand is good.”
Don’t buy a guitar if the strings (notably the bass strings) rattle, especially if the dealer downplays your concerns by saying: “you can always change the strings on the guitar when you get home.”
Your tone preferences and your left and right hand “embouchure” will change over time, just as your expectations of your guitar—this affects your responses/attraction to different guitar strings over time.
As with players who will usually change and develop their technique, touch, and tone preferences over time, so will guitars change as they get older—this affects their interaction with, and responses to, strings.
“Tweaking” your guitar by using different combinations of bass and treble strings can be a revealing and rewarding adventure. Not only can it solve specific problems, but it can also bring out the strengths in your guitar’s particular tonal capacity/range.
Never be afraid to experiment with different string brands, materials, and tensions if your budget can cope. Be prepared to do research and spend money with no guarantee that any string will magically transform your guitar sound or playing.