|
|
|
six new strings
Sunday, July 15 2007
I finally put six new strings on my red "Epi," which is a Stratocaster knockoff (in other words, a solid-body electric guitar with three single-coil pickups). Up until I did this, the strings on that guitar had the very same ones that it had come with when I'd bought it from an Ocean Beach (San Diego) pawn shop in 1999. Amazingly, though, only one of its strings, the high E, had broken in all of this time. I take that back, another string (the D, third from the bottom) had broken at some point and left me enough string (when I retied the nut) to run it to the A tuning peg (second from the bottom), so for a long time the D and A had been tuned by each others' pegs, making the tuning of that guitar a decidedly non-intuitive process.
I'm no audiophile and my guitar skills are a sort of improvised self-taught fret-based mathematics for which I lack a descriptive language. So I'd assumed that I wouldn't benefit much from a change of strings. But with the new strings the guitar suddenly felt like it had been born again. My hands wandered up and down the fretboard doing all my old patterns and there was a joy and subtlety to the sound, as well as responsiveness to my fingers, that it had lacked for years. Instead of playing it for a minute or two I played it for a good twenty or thirty. Mind you, that was with all my guitar playing muscles atrophied from years of disuse.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?070715 feedback
previous | next |
