Fortissimo

Three posts in a day my God I must be bored.

My previous set of strings, the GHS Contact Core Bright Bronze, was getting a little tarnished, and rust, in my carelessness, had begun to grow on the first and second strings, marring the sound by abit, that, not to boast, was probably only detectable by me, because 1) I know I have a more sensitive ear, and 2) I've been hearing that string plucked by my own finger everyday, so I could tell when the sound was beginning to go off.

The Contact Core, you should know, is not a very common set. Especially since I bought the Ultra Light set, from 10-46 if I'm not wrong.

If you dunno what I'm talking about, you're probably normal.

So at Yamaha the other day, armed with a blue note, I put myself in front of the strings section, staring at every single pack that had ACOUSTIC printed somewhere on it. And after having a 10-46 pack, seeing a set labelled Light: 11-52 made me roll my eyes and scoff in disgust. Light my ass, it'd light a fire on my fretting fingers that's what it'll do.

So I settled upon the the Extended Play section of strings. Now these strings, which most brands have in some form or the other. Extended Play, Extended Life, whatever.

These EXPs have their windings, for the lower strings, and just directly on the first two strings I guess, a coating of special material that retards oxidization, and thus, as the name suggests, extends the play or life of these strings.

Now these strings come with a price, for long life, pretty much just like any other thing... Porcelain bowls cost more than paper bowls, high-end graphic cards, which can play more games for a longer duration before requirements get too much to handle, cost more than a basic on-board card.

$24. +.

Which very obviously makes me utterly frightened of making one wrong move and snapping the string. $4. TOCK-OOOONNGG... and my face and tear ducts will also tock. Thank goodness I remembered what Graham told me about replacing strings, and followed his method, which I won't put here because it involves extra descriptive work on my part and will only serve to deepen that confused frown on your face anyway, so forget it. Graham said do this this this, then, when you're sure it's not gonna stretch anymore, you can then snip off the excess strings dangling off the machine heads.

After I snipped off the strings, I ran my thumb on each of them, and my heart stopped AND fell six feet when all I heard was a mindless buzz on the second string. Quickly I used the pliers to twist the little bit of string around the hole to try to secure the damn string. And thank thank thank thank thank thank thank thank double thank God that it did catch and tighten in the end.

And now I'm playing every night until my fingers everything but split into two, because even though I have little problem fretting hard enough, the cumulative toll on my accustomed-to-even-lighter-strings fingertips wasn't too amusing. Maroon lines indicate where the string had pressed into my hand, and I have this bad feeling that behind my callused skin my flesh had already been sliced into, and that if I just squeezed hard enough blood would happily gush out. It's quite bad.

But like I said, I'd rather have abit of pain for a week or so than live on light strings, although the light strings also provide an unforgettably bright tone for my guitar. But most guitars use my current string set guage, so I thought I'd better get used to it.

Plenty of time too, with Extended Play strings.