Guitar Strings

Let's take a few minutes and discuss Guitar Strings. I use two different brands, GHS & D'Addario depending on which guitars they're going on and what type of sound I'm looking for.

On my earlier model Ibanez guitars, I use GHS Boomers (steel wound), 9's over 10's for that old fashioned heavy sound from the 80's. They sing nicely and are fairly bright, so that works out very well with the Maple body of the older guitars. I have a bunch of Destroyer II's and an old Roadstar tuned down to D and these strings seem to work well on them. Plenty of low end with the bite of a steel string for clarity.

My Ibanez JS 1200 has a Floyd Rose licensed tremolo from Ibanez and has a brighter sound. I prefer using a Nickel wound string that can stand up to the punishment for a rounder tone. My strings of choice on this guitar are the D'Addario XL Nickel Wound (EXL 120) in a straight 9 gauge. This cleans up the low end and the higher strings have more body than a normal steel string.

I will point out that when my high "E" breaks on my JS 1200, it usually does it under the nut and I don't know it until I run out of travel on the fine-tuner and unlock the nut, so I'm swearing by the D'Addario's on that guitar. The GHS Boomers always seem to break somewhere down by the Bridge, but usually only after extreme punishment, so they work well on the older style guitars IMO.

I'm not a big fan of too many other stings out there, there's so many of them that it really comes down to personal preference.

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