Do different brands of guitar strings (of the same weight and material) sound different on one guitar?
I’m not a guitarist, but I have spent a fairly large amount of time working with guitarists in the course of recording music. Sometimes we engineers can become even more familiar with the instrument (from a technical standpoint) than the player is. You’d be surprised how many rock’n’roll guitar-god wannabes walk into the studio after having put new strings on their axe, an hour before the session. Bad news. 🙂 Even when we’re talking about the same materials, different brands of strings are manufactured to different tolerances, and sometimes by different methods. A set of crappy Ernie Ball strings will never, ever equal the clarity and crisp tone of a fine set of D’Addario or Martin strings of the very same material (say, bronze-wound steel.) Even within a brand there are strings of the same material that are constructed differently. D’Addario has both round-wound and flat-wound bronze-over-steel strings. The flat-wound strings give you less string noise and less fret and fingerboard w
