String Thing

The old folkie Dave Van Ronk once said, "God has a way of telling you when to change your strings." Apparently He tells different players different things about string changing and lets some, like me, decide on their own.

That's one of the burning issues in the guitar world -- without divine guidance, how often should you change strings? The correct answer seems to be: whenever you want to. It's been written that a set of strings has a playing life of 12 hours, which doesn't sound like much of a lifetime to me, before they go dead. But it's also been written that Eric Clapton's road manager says Clapton never changes a string unless it breaks and supposedly there is a woman performer who's gone years without changing because she likes the sound of rusty guitar strings. So as is often the case with guitar-related things, whatever works for you is fine.

Strings go dead and lose their tone and brightness because of the build-up of sweat, oil, dirt and various other forms of finger gunk between the coils. There are various cleaners on the market to combat this problem. As noted earlier, I'm not real hard on my strings so I try to get my money's worth out of them. I go with the Elixir coated strings, which are more durable -- and consequently about twice as expensive -- and I try to keep my hands clean.

When it's time to change again, I'm tempted to try these Knucklehead Strings out of Spanish Fork, Utah, just because it's hard to resist such distinctive packaging and branding. And they come with an extra high-E string.