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String care is relatively simple. You will find that you can increase
the life and liveliness of your strings if you wipe them off after
playing or in between sets. This will reduce the amount of time
that body acids have to work on the strings and will also remove
some of the dirt which gets trapped in the windings of the wound
strings. Dirt accumulation causes wound strings to become "dead"
sounding. You can often bring back the sound by pulling on the string
and letting it snap back. Do this a couple of times and the string
should come back to life for a little while. The reason for this
is that you knock the dirt out of the windings and that allows the
string to vibrate more freely.
You should change your strings
on some kind of regular basis depending upon the amount of playing
time you put on a string set. You can usually tell when strings
need to be changed in 1 of 2 ways:
- The string is hard to keep in tune.
- The string has a "singing" or "sizzling" type of sound.
The "singing" or "sizzling" sound is almost always an indication that
you need to change the 3rd string as soon as the set ends because
it is getting ready to break. |