The Evolution of Guitar Strings

Almost nothing under a guitarists' fingers was designed by the guitar business

Every piece by Francisco Tárrega that I have played on stage was written for strings made of sheep gut, and I have never once put a gut string on a guitar. Neither has anyone I have played alongside. The music outlasted the material it was composed for by about seventy years, which is a long time for nobody to think much about it.

Tárrega was a Spanish composer and guitarist who died in 1909, and his pieces are where most classical players end up sooner or later. Until the late 1940s the trebles on a classical guitar were plain gut, and the basses were a gut or silk core wound with fine metal wire. Gut had been the standard for plucked instruments since long before the guitar took a shape anyone today would recognise, and it held through the vihuela, through the baroque guitar, and right up to the generation that heard him play. Everything he left behind was worked out on intestine.

What that cost the player is worth being specific about, because it was not a small thing. Gut absorbs moisture, so an instrument that sat in tune through a dry afternoon rehearsal drifted once the hall filled with people and warmed up. Tuning between pieces was not a nervous habit, it was maintenance. New strings kept stretching for days after they went on. They broke without much warning, and the trebles broke most, which is precisely where the repertoire lives.

The part that would have driven me out of my mind, though, is the inconsistency. Strings were made by hand from material that varied from one animal to the next, and the diameter varied along the length of a single string. A string that is not the same thickness at both ends will not play in tune with itself up the neck. You can be exact at the nut and wrong at the twelfth fret, and no amount of practice touches it, because it is not you. Every player of that era was working around an instrument that was quietly lying to them, and had no way to prove it.

Andrés Segovia, the Spanish virtuoso who did more than anyone to establish the guitar as a concert instrument, spent years on this. He leaned on his luthier, the German maker Hermann Hauser, to press the manufacturers at Pirastro for consistent gauging, and by his own account got very little back for it. He later wrote about the brittleness of the strings he grew up with as a plain handicap on playing, which is an unusual admission from someone of that standing. The point is that the best player alive could not fix it by being better. It was a materials problem and it needed a materials answer.

The first real answer had already arrived, three centuries earlier, for a different part of the instrument. A low note needs mass on the string. You can add mass by making the string thicker, but past a certain point a thick gut string turns stiff, stops responding to the right hand, and sounds dead however well you play it. Early makers tried twisting several lengths of gut together, which helped and was not enough. The proper solution was to wind fine metal wire around a flexible core, so that the winding carries the weight while the core keeps the flexibility. The string gets heavy without getting rigid.

The oldest surviving record of it is a note from 1659 describing lute strings covered in silver wire, credited to a maker recorded only as Goretsky and preserved in correspondence involving the chemist Robert Boyle. Within a few decades the technique had spread out of Bologna through European instrument making, and it did rather more than deepen the bass register. It changed which instruments survived. Wound strings are part of why the cello displaced the older bass violin as quickly as it did, because a smaller body could suddenly produce a serious low end. A change in string construction rewrote the instrument around it, which is a pattern worth holding on to for later.

That trick has never gone away, and this is where I stopped reading about the subject and started recognising it. I spent a few years playing metal, mostly in drop tunings, and the reason a slackened low string still speaks instead of flapping about under the pick is exactly the 1659 solution. The low string on a down-tuned electric and the sixth string on a classical guitar are the same idea wearing different clothes. Whoever Goretsky was, he is still doing work in my case every time I open it.

Notice, though, where that came from. Not from instrument makers, and not from players. It came from the wire-drawing trade, which had got good enough at pulling metal fine and even to make wrapping practical. That is the first instance of something that runs through the entire history.

The trebles took another three hundred years and a war. Gut has a second market, and during the Second World War that market won: surgical suture demand took priority, and good gut strings became almost impossible to buy in the United States. Segovia, living in New York by then and complaining about it to anyone within earshot, raised the shortage at a party with a British diplomat. A month later the man produced nylon strings obtained through contacts at DuPont. Segovia found them clear with a faint metallic edge he wanted removed. Promising, not right.

Albert Augustine, a luthier working in New York, had reached the same material from the other direction. Unable to source what he needed under wartime restriction, he came across nylon sold as fishing line in an army surplus shop in Greenwich Village. He and Segovia were introduced in 1946 by Vladimir Bobri, the illustrator who edited the magazine Guitar Review, and between them they decided the idea was worth pursuing properly.

DuPont were not persuaded. They did not believe guitarists would accept the sound of a synthetic string, and agreed to supply the material only on the condition that Augustine did the development work himself. He spent three years grinding and polishing monofilament in his basement, refining the trebles through a long back and forth with Segovia about tone. At some point DuPont ran a blind listening test with their own staff, and their own staff picked the nylon over gut. The first commercial sets were produced in 1948 at the E. & O. Mari string works in New York, with the company's president Olinto Mari. The basses were harder and took longer; Augustine wound a nylon multifilament core with gold, with aluminium, and with several other metals before he and Segovia agreed that silver was the one that sounded right.

What actually changed there was not tone, whatever the marketing said afterwards. A nylon monofilament is extruded, and extruded means identical. The four-hundred-year problem Segovia had been raising since the 1920s was not solved by a better craftsman or a stricter workshop. It was solved by taking the craft out of the process altogether. The string stopped being made and started being produced, and every guitarist since has inherited an instrument that tells the truth about its own intonation.

By the early 1960s the electric guitar had arrived at its own version of the problem, and this is the episode I find hardest to let go of, because here the guitar industry is not a bystander but an obstacle.

Electric guitars left the factory with heavy sets, commonly a .012 or .013 on top and a wound third string. Ernie Ball, who ran a teaching studio and what was probably the first guitar-only shop in the United States, watched his students blister their fingers trying to hold that third string down, let alone bend it. He also noticed what working players had already worked out for themselves: throw away the low E, move every string up a position, and put a banjo string on top to get a light plain first. The technique existed before the product did. People wanted to bend notes and were assembling their own sets out of spare parts in order to do it.

Ball went to Fender and asked for a lighter gauge set. Leo Fender, who founded the company and designed most of what it sold, turned him down, and his reasoning is the part that matters. Lighter strings meant less tension, less tension meant the guitars would need re-engineering, and he was not interested in redesigning his instruments around somebody else's strings. Ball went to Gibson and got the same answer. So he had the sets made himself and put them out under his own name in 1962. Within about a decade Slinkys were the default for rock guitarists, and the companies that had refused him were selling light gauge sets of their own.

Everything downstream of that, the whole modern vocabulary of electric lead playing, the bends and the vibrato and the phrasing that depends on both, sits on a product two major manufacturers declined to make. Leo Fender was not being stupid, incidentally. He was right that it would mean changing the guitars, and the guitars did change.

Not every improvement came in from outside, and the exception is instructive. In 1966 John Entwistle, the bass player in The Who, went to the factory of the string maker Rotosound in Kent because their roundwound sets were close and not quite right. The D and the G behaved. The E and the A would not vibrate properly. He sat there through an afternoon while James How, who had founded the company, built him strings with different cores and different gauges, and the fault turned out to be in the core rather than the winding: it was too thin, so the string was moving in a wide circle instead of a tight one. That one came from a string company and a player working on it together, which is how you might assume the whole history went. It is close to the only time it did. I like the detail more than anything else here, because the visible part of the string was fine. The problem was in the part nobody looks at.

Meanwhile the classical side went back to the tackle box. The material that has done most to change classical guitar tone since nylon is PVDF, which everybody calls carbon, and which the French maker Savarez introduced as the Alliance range in 1990. It projects harder than nylon and lasts longer, and it now sits on a great many professional instruments. The Kureha chemical company in Japan developed it in the 1970s as fishing line, sold as Seaguar leader, and there are still classical players who buy the leader on a spool and cut their own trebles from it rather than pay string prices. So that is twice. The two great changes to the classical guitar's treble string, forty-two years apart, both came out of fishing tackle.

The steel side got its own version seven years later. W. L. Gore, the company behind Gore-Tex, was developing coated industrial push-pull cable in 1997 and using guitar strings as convenient test pieces. The coated strings made decent cable and poor guitar strings, but somebody noticed they were staying clean while the uncoated ones went dull. That became Elixir, and coating in one form or another is now everywhere.

Which leaves the string in an odd position. There is no unsolved acoustic problem left in it. Every constraint that shaped the music I learned has been answered, and almost every answer came from an industry that was not thinking about music at the time. The remaining questions are duller and closer to home: how long the tone survives contact with a human being, and what a set costs by the time it reaches you.

That second one is not abstract here. Everything on the wall of a South African music shop came in through a port, priced against the rand, which is why almost every player I know runs a set well past the point where it has anything left to give. The climate does not help either. Strings die faster in Durban than they do in Pretoria, and that is corrosion rather than folklore.

Four hundred years of gut and wire and polymer, arriving by way of a wire mill, a war, an industrial cable programme and two tackle boxes. And what I end up playing on next month comes down to what the shop happened to order.