turns out i had plenty of electric strings, after all. i'll have to get some acoustic strings, but i'm actually not even sure the guitar is usable. forgot about that.

i'm still debating whether to swap the strings on my jazz guitar. i'll probably do a few tests and then decide. bright, new strings are the fucking worst. but there's a point where they're a tetanus risk, too, and just sound dead. that middle point is the sweet spot. which generally means "don't ever change a string, unless it breaks".

...which is pretty rare on the jazz guitar, which is a black epiphone coronet. well, not really. this guitar was actually somebody's frankenstein, with what appears to be a vintage coronet neck pasted onto some kind of ibanez. i leave 12s on this guy and use it for about 80% of my recording, and have since the late 90s.

the other guitar is a red epiphone sg copy with much louder pickups (one may recall the high gain sg craze of a few years ago, although that wasn't a factor in getting it) that i keep 11s on and use sparingly for specific fuzzy lead sections. to me, 11 is low gauge; anything less than that, and i'm breaking strings every session...

i've variously had other guitars hanging around for alternate tunings and whatnot, but they've disappeared. i know i tossed one because i got shocked from it. there's another that seems to have been stolen, along with an electric mandolin and a 12-string guitar and some other things.

but that's all ready to go now for when i wake up. :).

it's sort of comical to me that these thick strings are being presented as anomalous to make your shredding sound thicker, when the purpose of skinny strings was to help shredders get through certain sections because they couldn't play it on "normal" jazz strings. which are actually 13s. i mean, i guess it's nice to see that the trick is no longer perceived as necessary, but this stuff is more flash than substance. this is really quite silly.

thick strings like this are great for blues players, and help to fatten up those big jazz chords, if you play them. punkabilly. etc. but if you want to seriously shred? well, they cut the gauge down specifically for you. and this shit is deceiving...