A friend of mine was kind enough to give me a set of DR Black Beauties for Christmas.
I strung them up and much like my experience with Elixirs on my Les Pauls - meh. I just prefer the feel and sound of traditional nickle would strings.
Its just me because the coated strings have quite a following.
I’ll play these DR’s a while as I know they cost a few bucks.
-Doc
They are not bad when it comes to tone and sound. I do like the feel. The do feel dead sooner that nickel coated string. I like the smooth-ish even feel they are a notch better than the Neon series, that I don’t like because they flake off.
Well, I keep using them for a while.
They’re not bad. Maybe I’ll start to prefer the smoother finish after a while.
-Doc
I was thinking of trying some coated strings om my Ibanez 5 string instead of the nickel coated steel d-Addario strings it came with to reduce finger noise. Anyone else care to comment?
D’Addario coated strings are pretty good and still offer plenty of brightness unlike DR strings, which is on the dull side. Do you have problems with string noise?
Enough string noise when doing slides to bother me. It certainly makes sense that strings coated with forever PFAS environmentally viscous plastic would have a duller sound than “bare” strings. I was also wondering if the plastic coating would quickly wear around the most used frets.
You can also use spray product like fingerEase or dry product from graph tech or just talcum powder. Both types will greatly reduce finger noise and promote better glide. Back in the day, the best strings Lube is your nose grease, lol.
Part of this is also technique. During slides your finger is necessarily on the string, but if you are getting excessive string noise while not sliding it probably means you are playing something at a speed close to the edge of your capability for that piece, and working on practicing that will probably reduce the noise.
But if you want to completely remove noise during a slide, yeah, you’ll want flats, half-rounds, or some kind of string lube. Which will sacrifice tone for smoothness - you’ll lose the brightness of the uncoated rounds.
D’Addario nickel rounds are my favorite rounds that I have tried so far for their combination of feel and tone. Others haven’t come close to the EXL and NYXL lines for me.
Ewwwww!
Oh, there used to be another reason to use plastic coated strings. I used to live in Vietnam, where there is no ground. If that wasn’t bad enough, the two remaining wires are both “hot”. As in neither side is neutral. So I would get shocks pretty often from the strings! I just remembered that as I accidently packed a Vietnamese cord set, which has the ground prong cut off. I am playing in my new country and just got shocked from my bass strings. Need to go buy a 3 wire cord set. But I keep on playing. for the time being. A dedicated guy, no?
Usually, the slide won’t cut through the mix unless you treble turn up too much, this also not an issue in live situation. I actually use that extras to gauge my brightness level the finger noise, slight fret buzz.
Above all else like @howard said technique helps. I don’t have any issues on my bass but when I play my cheap Squier stratocoustic acoustic/electric guitar it happens all the time when I change chords.
100% agree, d’addario EXL are great.