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302 Part V: Gearing Up: Outfitting Your Arsenal TEAM LinG
No matter how gentle you are on the strings, the tone of your guitar isn’t
what it used to be after several months of constant playing, biochemical
assaults from your fingers, and environmental changes. One sure-fire way to
determine whether you need to change the strings? If you can’t remember
the last time you changed them — then it’s definitely time!
Choosing the Right Strings
Chances are, when you purchased your guitar, it had the right type of strings
attached. So hopefully, if you bought an electric guitar, it came with strings
designed for an electric guitar in the appropriate gauge. But, just so you know
what you’re looking for when you want to replace your current strings (or if
you want to experiment with different types of strings), consider the following
list when making your string-changing decisions:
The gauge of a string is its thickness and determines how easy the string
is to fret and bend.
Fretting involves pushing the string down onto the fretboard with your
fingers.
Bending is the act of pushing or pulling the strings sideways across the
fretboard, which raises the pitch of the note.
The fretboard is the top of the neck of the guitar — the part where the
frets protrude and where your fingers press the strings when fretting.
Higher-numbered gauges (or heavier gauges, as guitarists call them) are
stiffer and provide more resistance, but they also hold their tuning and tone
better and wear out less quickly than lighter-gauge strings.
Striking a balance among playing comfort, string performance, and longevity
is important. Here are a few tidbits to keep in mind when you’re choosing
your strings:
Blues guitarists like their blues guitar set up with strings that fight back.
This give and take allows the guitarist to really dig in to the strings. (Rock
guitars, on the other hand, may have lighter-gauge strings, because the
light ones facilitate super-fast playing and extreme string bending.)
The more experienced you are as a player, the better you are at managing
heavier gauges. But that doesn’t mean you necessarily prefer them.
Many blues guitarists go strictly for playability and comfort and put
ultra-light-gauge strings on their guitars and then just get used to changing
out the strings a lot.
In the end, the choice of string gauge is completely up to the player’s individual
preference.