Is string aging rigged?

[Chordite]

Ive just read a piano article where the guy says he still has the original strings from 1921 and it sounds fine.

So why do guitar strings go dead so quick? I have a lot of gutars so some get little use but the strings still fade.

There are no kinks in them

They haven't worn flat spots against the frets

They aren't breaking down mechanicaly because they are still roughly in tune

They are clean and shiny, not rusty.

Yet, they are going dull! So what gives? Why do we accept strings that seem to be designed at some molecular level to fail? Why can't we have the same piano wire standards the keyboard guys get?

Is it the biggest scam in music that nobody questions because it is so ubiquitous?

[Marko]

Good question.  Maybe part of it is that the piano strings aren’t being touched… I dunno.

[Virgman]

Not sure how you can tell if electric guitar strings are dull.  Maybe if you play clean but if you use some dirt how could you tell?

There have people using the same strings for years and years with no loss of tone.  I read a guitarist in the Wrecking Crew who never changed his strings.

On an acoustic sure you can tell.

But as above post mentioned it's probably the dirt and oils from your hands that affect them.

 

 

 

 

 

[stormin1155]

I bought my Les Paul almost 4 years ago and it has had the original strings on it until just a week ago.  I really haven't noticed that the new strings made it sound any better.   If your hands sweat a lot (mine don't) you have to change more frequently.  The times I've lent my guitar to a bandmate it's come back with gunky strings and I end up changing them.

I suspect piano strings last longer because:

1. they don't get touched by sweaty, grimy hands
2. they are struck with a soft mallet and don't come into contact with any metal (frets)
3. they are not constantly being stretched from tuning and bending
4. they don't take sharp turns over hard edges like nuts and saddles

[Chordite]

(My hands don't sweat and I don't play while eating BBQ ribs so the strings are pretty clean.)

However all the talk of finger gunge reminds me that in my early days a lot of the folk guys used to literally boil their wound strings in a pan of water to restore life. Anbody here tried that?

[DaveAronow]

Yes, boiling absolutely does not work.

All it does is "cooks" all the gunk stuck under the winds and might serve as a nice base for some sort of soup, but the gunk will still be in there.

I used to change my bass strings every three hours of playing time while touring because I love brand new, bright crisp sounding strings, which got stupidly expensive until I got a string endorsement. I tried every brand, every make, model, and I would get about three hours out of any set before the ultrabright tone started to fade. Yes, bass strings will last for years. But that new bright crisp tone only lasts a while and then the string dies even though it could look new for years.

I tried everything , boiling, and a bunch of other methods in an attempt to find something that would bring old strings back to life.

I finally settled on soaking them in carbeurator cleaner, which DID work to a point. It would bring them back to about 70 percent of their brightness, and they would stay fresh for about 70 percent of the time new strings would.

It worked, but the cleaner was toxic, smelly, and I had to lug around a mason jar with carb cleaner on tour with me which was a hassel and actually a little ridiculous. Fortunately I dont have to do that anymore, but changing bass strings, which have a huge difference in tone when they die compared to new, is expensive if you want to keep that really bright, fresh crisp new string sound.

Guitar strings dont sound anywhere near as different from new to old as bass strings do and are cheap enough, I just change them when they are done.

Even if boiling did work, which it doesn't, am I going to go through all that trouble to save five bucks? Hell no, I have way better things to do with my time, like waste it here.

And even though you think your hands are clean, you are still jamming dead skin and oil into the winds.
All strings will eventually die with use. Just buy new ones and be done with it.