Forgive me Father, for I have sinned: it has been over a year since I changed the strings on my guitars…
I used to change strings almost religiously after every third gig or so. I just didn’t want the hassle of suddenly having one let go, particularly because my main guitar has a floating trem, so if one does go ping! all the others are pulled sharp by the balance springs. Actually it was worse than that: I used to carefully wipe the strings after playing in order to make them last longer. Then somehow I grew less and less bothered… I blame playing bass, with strings as thick as bridge cables there’s relatively little chance of one letting go, and if it did it would probably take a finger off with it at the same time, which would be of more immediate concern. I’ve been meaning to change my strings all week, then suddenly it came to this evening and time to pack my stuff up and head out to the gig, and no string-changing had happened. Also since I changed to using 10s (guitar speak for a pack of strings that have a high E string with a diameter of 10 thousandths of an inch) I simply don’t break strings as often as when I used 9s. I can’t imagine how prone to breaking a set of 8s are, I assume they’re like some mysterious high energy sub-atomic particle that only exists for fractions of a second before vapourising.
Of course, the longer I go without breaking a string, the less likely I am to change them (it ain’t broke…)
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