Re: How long should strings last?

mrcrow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> this seems to be an old chestnut; some say years; others gigs...

> my personal timings are when ONE of the set begins to show poor
> response relative to the others...usually the A string..
> as a guess i would put my timings at about 3 months..
> that is playing once a week full practice once a week
> and at home on my own about 2 hours a day....
> i buy good strings but never boil them..

Yeah I think it varies and depends a lot on the tone you seek.
I've found that with duller-toned strings you can get them
to last just about forever! I've had some so long that they
got rusty and I had to take steel wool to them to clean them up!

But if you are into bright round-wound sound, then that won't
do. They get full of finger gunk quick and that bright "edge"
just disappears. Boiling is too big a hassle for me! So what I
do is take them off and clean them with some strong grease-cutting
bad-for-the-environment chlorinated hydrocarbons! Works like a
champ, but HARD on a bass finish if it's within splash range!
And then just as a "tune-up" I wipe them down on the bass after 
each gig or practice with isopropyl alcohol. At least on my 
basses that stuff is totally harmless to the finishes. That 
keeps the gunk level down so that take-off-the-strings cleanings
are much more rare.

With the gunk-cleaning round-wounds can typically last for months
and sometimes for even a year, BUT it's not magic. Eventually 
the string metal starts to go. The strings begin to act funny
even when freshly cleaned. The windings can start to get pushed 
around by the frets, and if you push things they will soon break.

So the definitve answer as everyone has said is "it depends"!
What kind of strings? What kind of tone? How hard do you play?

Benj
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