D’Addario EFT15

Acoustic Guitar Strings, flat tops, Phosphor Bronze, Extra Light

According to the label. they have a warm, semi-bright tone. A semi-flat ultra smooth surface, perfect for slide playing, flat picking and recording, with reduced finger noise.

Well the last part’s right, the finger noise is reduced from the beginning. First impressions on re-stringing them was that they were very bright. V.V. Bright Indeed. Any brighter and you could use them as fog lamps. But….

I don’t think I’ve ever had a set of strings settle down quite so quickly. At the start, finger picking seemed to make the strings buzz, flat picking you could hear the noise of the pick on the string over the sound of the note. But I played them for several minutes (John Denvers’ Annies Song if you’re interested – because of the rapid chord changes) gave them their 4th stretch of the day and tried again.

Now they resemble the blurb.

They come in a phosphor bronze coloured pack, or as we say in England, Brown, wrapped in a plastic pouch with a number on it that you’re encouraged to enter into the D’Addario website Players Circle rewards program. Join this and you can send your strings back for recycling and gain extra (Brownie?) points. The strings aren’t individually wrapped but they are colour coded on the end of the string you stick in your guitars body. They’re coiled together in pairs, E-A, D-G, B-e. I’m not going to tell you how to restring a guitar; there’s enough tutorials out there to help you, though I’d suggest you learn the very simple Luthiers Knot and find a tutorial that shows you that if you don’t already know it. Also take the opportunity, with the strings off, to clean your guitar thoroughly.

Give your strings a stretch: over the sound hole (or cone cover on a resonator) hook you’re forefinger under each string and pull up quite hard, the run the forefinger of your other hand from the neck to the highest fret, keeping in contact with the fretboard, 3 or 4 times.

Retune

Try to play. Note how you go out of tune very quickly. Repeat the stretch. try to play. About the 3rd time you’ll be able to play for a few minutes and after the 4th for a while longer. Keep your tuner to hand and, for this first day at least, keep stretching the strings. When that doesn’t change the tuning, you can stop stretching.

Now you’ll also hear the strings as they’ll sound for some time to come. How much time? I’ll come back to this blog and let you know.

Update

It’s about 2 months since I strung my guitar with these strings. They’ve been played regularly, every day at home and for about 21 days (not in a row) in one of the most hostile environments known to half naked people – The Beach. 20mph winds, temperatures up to 26c, salt air and sand being blasted everywhere.,

Despite this the strings maintained their tone and kept their tuning quite well – until this last week before writing this update. This week I’ve had to retune several times a day, and a day means 3 to 4 hours or constant playing. In a less hostile environment they don’t need retuning all that much. The sound has diminished but still isn’t bad. However I wouldn’t want to do a studio session with these strings as they are now.

One other thing that I’ve noticed was that after a couple of weeks playing bends became radically easier. Although my previous strings were also lightweight it was never really possible to get much more than a half-tone bend, but with these I’ve managed close to, if not actually on, a full tone bend. Blues players might find that noteworthy.

So, recommended usage.

These strings will do quite well in a studio environment, especially if your guitar is left there for the whole session. you might want to think about replacing them after about 3 weeks, closer to 2 if you’re going to be doing a lot of overdubs on your previous recordings. You might be able to get 4 weeks out,

Gigging constantly, maybe 3-4 weeks, depending on what sort of sound you want.

A professional rehearsing for studio or tours, or maybe song-writing. 5-6 weeks, although you might still be happy with the sound at that point so stick with them until you aren’t. Change them a couple of days before any performance, but I shouldn’t need to tell you that 🙂

Recreational player? You could get 6 to 9 months, maybe longer.

Like all things the timings given above are just guidelines. You need to make your own mind up about the condition of your strings and whether you need new ones. The variables are how often and hard you play, how hot or humid it is, what type of music you play, finger or flat picking? I can’t tell you what will happen in your world, only what happened in mine.

At the time of writing these could be bought for £23.99 with a RRP of £27.90