nylon Archives - tonefiend.com

No longer ridiculously expensive — just REGULAR expensive. — No longer ridiculously expensive. Now they’re just very expensive.

I spent last week covering the Musikmesse musical instrument trade show in Frankfurt, Germany, for Premier Guitar. I had a blast, and Chris Kies and I posted details and pics of more than 70 new products. (Here’s the short list of our personal faves.) Kies shot lots of video, and will be posting more than 50 demo segments to the PG site in the coming weeks.

But Messe is hellishly loud, far noisier than NAMM. When I finally got home and picked up a guitar, it was an acoustic. I was trying something new, based on info I obtained from Mary Faith Rhoads-Lewis, CEO of Breezy Ridge, a company that distributes several brands for acoustic musicians, including John Pearse strings.

I’d previously geeked out here about about the strangest and most expensive guitar strings I’d ever tried: this “rope core” set from Austria’s Thomastik-Infeld. Reader/cool guy Al Milburn turned me on to them, and I wrote about them here. And I recently posted this video demonstrating how the transformed my old Martin 0-17 into a compelling steel/nylon hybrid with a unique and expressive voice.

Anyway, Ms. Rhoads-Lewis told me that the late John Pearse originally created this set for Thomastik, and that the John Pearse Folk Fingerpicking set [PJ116] is identical to what the Austrian company sells. Best part: You can get them in the States for under $20, as opposed to a walloping $35 for the Thomastiks. She also told me that their magic works in reverse: You can put this relatively low-tension set on a classical guitar for a very different sort of hybrid steel-string sound. (This, she said, is exactly what the great Brazilian player Bola Sete used to do.)

I popped a set on my old Yairi classical. The feel was — totally strange, and in precisely the opposite way as on the Martin. The tone was edgy and exciting, but the tension seemed a little too extreme. If just seemed a little too … high-strung, in every sense. Then I tried lowering the entire tuning a whole step, with the sixth dropped all the way to C.

And … oh, my. Check it out:

Summary: Holy cannoli, I love how this sounds. And there’s something psychologically satisfying about the transformation too. See, this guitar has always been a bit … tragic to me. I got it when I was 16. My classical guitar prof at UCLA said I needed a better instrument, and my every-supportive folks, bless ’em, helped me buy this Alvarez Yairi for around $700 (in 1970s dollars). It was a top-tier model for Alvarez, signed by luthier Kazuo Yairi, and boasting lovely Brazilian rosewood backs and sides. It was a huge upgrade for me, but as I got deeper into classical playing, its shortcomings emerged. Had I not shifted my studies to composition, I’d have needed to upgrade again. I envied the Igancio Fleta y Hijos models my two teachers played, but at around $3,000, they were beyond my budget, even with parental help. (Pity — their current value is approaching $50,000.) So I’ve used this instrument as a limited but decent-sounding model suitable for pop work, if not serious classical concertizing.

PLUS: New Contest! Name the Classic 6-String Bass Riffs and Win a Seymour Duncan Pickup Booster Pedal!

"We both love candlelight, long walks on the beach, and really expensive old-school strings."

NOTE: The contest is at the bottom of this post. You can skip ahead if you don’t care about rare and expensive guitar strings.

What do the classical guitar and the Fender Bass VI have in common?

Both instruments were developed using types of strings that are practically extinct.

First, let’s talk nylon strings. When these appeared after WWII, classical guitarists, led by Andrés Segovia, ditched gut overnight. Nylon strings were louder and brighter, and they offered better consistency, superior intonation, and longer life.

Few living guitarists have ever actually played gut strings, which really are made from animal guts (usually cows, goats, or sheep). I’ve never tried them myself.

But one of my darkest secrets is the fact that I started out as a teenaged lute player. (I have a photo of myself playing on a hay bale at a Renaissance Faire, wearing a feathered tudor cap and white tights. And you will never, ever see it.) I experimented with gut lute strings, only to run screaming. Total tuning nightmare, especially on an Elizabethan-era axe with friction tuning pegs, not to mention lots of unison- and octave-tuned strings. Guitarists were smart when they ditched the stuff.

But I recently bought a new ukelele, which came strung a set of Aquila strings from Italy. They have several lines of faux-gut nylon strings made from a proprietary material called — wait for it — “nylgut,” which allege to capture the sound of gut without the tears. They sounded cool on the uke, so I ordered a few guitar sets. At between $12 and $21 dollars per set, depending on the bass-string wrap material, they’re pricy, but not crazy expensive — about the same as other high-end, E.U.-made brands, like Savarez or Thomastik-Infeld. (Aquila’s US distributor is Just Strings.)

And holy cow, do I love ’em! They don’t look anything like gut strings, which resemble, well, dried-out intestines. But they really do capture a lot of “gutness.” Their tone is quieter and warmer than conventional nylon, with markedly less string noise (a great thing for a very rusty classical player like me). Check out this demo: