ISSUE 334 } MAY 2022

I DON’T USUALLY talk about gear in my GT editorial, but the topic this month is strings, and they are very closely allied to technique, when you think about it.

It’s weird how diffferent examples of the same guitar can feel completely unalike. I have two main Strats, a red one with a rosewood fretboard that I keep at home, and a sunburst maple neck one that I use on stage. The red one has bigger frets but for some reason the strings feel more taut, to the extent that I recently restrung it with 009.5s to make bends a bit more slinky than with its usual .010s. Almost simultaneously my sunburst stage guitar, also usually strung with .010s, started to feel rattly and flappy. So I changed that one to .011s and the two instruments now both feel just right to me. Odd, eh?