Re: Wegen Bluegrass Pick/Weber Strings
String life can be a tricky thing for a variety of reasons: how often & how long we play, how hard we fret, what sound we like to hear, who (and how loud!) we play with, how attentive we are to the -slowly- changing tone of the strings, and (most baffling to many) our individual finger/skin chemistry. As a result of all this, some pros change their strings for every show, most (?) of us amateurs change them every few weeks to every few months, and some of us change them almost never, meaning only when they become impossible to keep in tune... or when the broken windings start to rattle!
My personal experience, on both guitar and mandolin, is that my finger chemistry is fairly benign and the strings rarely show signs of wear. To me, they just keep on sounding "good" even as they lose tone & volume, especially when playing alone or in moderate-volume groups. It's usually in bluegrass, going against banjos & fiddles, where the loss of volume and crisp attack becomes obvious. As a result, I've sort of guilted myself, on the most-often played instruments, into changing strings once a year whether they need it or, uhmm, not. Your mileage may vary.
I'll withhold comment on picks except the say that I've been experimenting with Wegens lately, after having settled on D'Andrea Pro-Plecs for mandolin over the past 6 or 8 years.
And, oh yeah: Welcome!
- Ed
"Then one day we weren't as young as before
Our mistakes weren't quite so easy to undo
But by all those roads, my friend, we've travelled down
I'm a better man for just the knowin' of you."
- Ian Tyson
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