I Was DEFINITELY Using The Wrong Guitar Strings

okay so us guitar players are a pretty finicky group of people when we find something we like we tend to stick to it and in some cases even defend it to the death on forums and message boards and comment sections all over the internet now well I tend to stay off of the forums and message boards and comment sections I am sometimes guilty of this sort of fundamentalist way of viewing guitar and guitar gear I'm guilty of believing that the way I do some things is the best way to do them and occasionally I'm proven wrong so yesterday I went over to Ricky autos and did a video with Rick and Dave honorato and Ken Lanyon if you haven't seen it you should absolutely go watch that video first and then come back here and check this out I'll have it linked down below essentially the gist of it was does strain gauge matter does the size of the string have an effect on the tone of your guitar yes anyone who has switched strain gauges before will tell you there's a definite difference between the playability and feel of a string and definitely a difference in the tone of a string and up until yesterday I always thought that thicker heavier gauge strings were better there was more tone there and quite frankly I was proven completely wrong in Rick's video we took his Les Paul and strung it up with 11s tens nines and eight played into the same rig the same riff and I have to admit I liked the lighter gauge strings now this is a big deal for me because for years this was one of those fundamentalist sort of views I had in terms of guitar but yesterday in that video I found that I might actually prefer lighter gauge strings for years I've played tens and at some point I even played Elevens on my Gibson's on my es-335 played 11s on that for years again because I thought oh well these sound better there's you know more tone but yesterday I saw the light and this is a follow up video to Rick's video I'm gonna swap the strings on some of my favorite guitars and see if I really prefer lighter gauge strings or not reality is I'm making this video for my own purposes I'm using it as an excuse to record and test my guitars on my rig with the sounds that I like to use live and when I'm writing in recording I really want to see if these are better it's one thing to go to a friend's studio and play their stuff on their gear this is for me I want to see what's better tens nines maybe even eights so I just went down to Guitar Center bought five packs of Ernie Ball super slinkys these are nine to forty two and I'm gonna swap out the strings on my primary guitars starting with my novo Sarris J this is my number one guitar and I want to start with this one because of the bridge on Rick's video we were playing a Les Paul with a two nematic bridge this is a completely different bridge design in almost every way but before we get started if you're new here welcome to the channel I post videos every single week so be sure to hit the subscribe button down below and click that Bell icon to be notified when I'm posting new videos and going live here on the channel every Sunday night so with all that other way let's get started right now I've got standard ten to forty six strings on the Novo we're gonna play this use a couple of different sounds and then we're gonna swap the strings and see what happens alright so we're gonna be using my high watt custom 20 here going through the matching to twelve cabinet that's loaded with vanes and I've got those speakers miked up with a blue encore one hundred I which is like an sm57 and a sennheiser md 421 and those are going into two preamps from great river electronics the MP 500 vs and from there going into logic pretty simple signal chain we're gonna use that for the whole video let's start with the tins on the Novo saris J so we can get kind of a baseline [Music] [Music] okay so next I want to try it some thanks again the point of this video is not to do the super scientific direct head-to-head between the tens and the nines we already did that in rick's video this is to see how it fits in with my style and my sound and my rig so i've got my main pedal board on the floor here going straight into the front of the high watt and i'm gonna go for some sounds that I commonly use my favorite overdrive sound some fuzz sounds some delay and reverb and then we're gonna compare that against the nines my thought is that the nines are gonna be more clear and more bell-like and possibly cut through the mix better especially with the effects but we'll see [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] you [Music] so I just got done listening back to both recordings the tens versus the nines and there's a pretty dramatic difference to my ear now the difference in the top-end the clarity the nines are obviously more clear but part of that has to do with the fact that these are brand new strings fresh out of the pack now the tens that were on this guitar were only about two or three days old I just restrung this the other day but there was some oxidation they're not as fresh as these slinkys right out of the packs so that is part of the reason these were a little bit brighter but that's not the difference that I'm interested in the biggest difference is in the low end the low end on the lighter gauge strings is much tighter and more direct it's less fluffy and it's really apparent to my ear when I'm using reverb and delay it's also helping a lot in my overdrive signal I'm using the Mythos Mule near and the Paul Cochran Timmy both individually and stacked together and the tighter low end to my ear is helping that overdrive sound punched through and cut through a little more than it did on the tens now again if you watch tricks video that was pretty much the conclusion that we came to I'm not breaking any new ground with that in this video and the other thing is if you want tighter low end or more clarity there's multiple ways you could go about doing that rather than switching the string gauge on your guitar I mean this amp for example has a 3 band EQ if I wanted a tighter low end I could simply turn the bass and maybe some of the mid controlled down a little bit or if I wanted more clarity just turn the treble up so it's not really the difference in tone that I'm after here the thing that really struck me in Rick's video yesterday is when I was playing that Les Paul when we switched from the 11s to the tens and then the tens to the nines I noticed in my playing that I was a lot more comfortable and when you're more comfortable you play with more confidence and when I just swapped two nines on this guitar I noticed a similar effect guitars easier to play which means I'm playing more confidently I'm going for bins they're easier to hit my vibrato feels easier it feels easier to grab chords and even in the right hand the way the pic is interacting with the string it feels like I can dig into the guitar a little bit more and just pull some more grit out of it and now for proof of concept and in the interest of being thorough I'm gonna do the same thing to my Les Paul there's tens on here now and this is a different scale length than the Novo and it has a completely different style bridge on it as well so going to play the tins swap them out and see what the differences [Music] [Music] you [Music] so as you might expect there's similar results of the less Paul more clarity which is partially due to the fresh strings but also tighter and more focused low in and the mid-range I think is a little bit more present in these humbuckers and that is one difference between the humbuckers and the single coils of p90s in the saris jay is the mid-range is definitely more present here with the nines but again I really like the feel of the thinner strings even on the different scale lengths and with the different bridge design it feels easier to play it's more engaging and I'm just more comfortable overall so I'm the type of player that usually has a pretty heavy touch on the guitar I really dig into the fretboard which honestly isn't great it's a little bit harder to play with finesse and dynamic when you're really gripping the crap out of the fretboard and so I think the thing that's really drawing me to the nines is it's forcing me to lighten my touch with these lighter gauge strings if you dig in super hard you're gonna pull the note or the chord completely out of tune especially if you have tall frets on your guitar and so as I'm playing these lighter gauge strings are forcing me to play with a little bit more finesse in a lighter touch overall I can play licks a little bit easier that were challenging me before again it's not a huge difference it's not night and day but it is there and it's noticeable noticeable enough that I think I'm gonna switch to nines on pretty much all my guitars now now again this is subjective and your mileage may vary but to me the important thing here is to be more open-minded about these kind of ideas yes I realized in the grand scheme of things string gauge on your guitar isn't all that important but it taught me a lesson which is when you think you've got it figured out that might not always be the case and you should be more open to take in other ideas in different perspectives not to get all philosophical on a video about guitar strings but let me know what you think in the comments section down below what gauge strings do you play and would you be willing to switch to by something new like I said if you haven't seen Rick be Otto's video on this subject yet check it out it's linked in the description box down below if you like what I'm doing here and you want to support the channel there are links down below as well where you can buy t-shirts coffee mugs you can get access to my Hilux presets and my Kemper profiles and you can sign up for the green room down there the green room is a monthly subscription which gets you access to a private forum where there's lesson of the week content going up I'm also putting up new tour dates now those are linked on my website down below as well that's all for today's video hope you enjoyed it my name is Rhett Shaw and remember there is no plan B

Channel: Rhett Shull

Views: 989,354

Rating: 4.8893194 out of 5

Keywords: Rhett Shull, Rick Beato, Guitar Strings, Ernie Ball, guitar lesson, guitar tutorial, electric guitar, Novo Serus J, gibson les paul standard 50s, gibson les paul standard, gibson les paul standard 2019, light gauge strings, light gauge strings vs heavy, light gauge strings vs medium, Guitar, fret buzz, guitar maintenance

Id: 42lF0ITBKHk

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 25 2020

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