Strings Direct

21/02/2020
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How Eco-Friendly are your Guitar Strings?

There’s little doubt that our planet is facing a climate crisis and nowadays there’s no shying away from doing your bit to help. This is especially true for businesses, with every industry having a key role to play in helping to become more eco-friendly and save our planet for generations to come. So where do our guitar strings fall into all of this? What can the brands do to help and what areas can they focus on to help improve their carbon footprint?  Below we’re going to discuss what the... Read More

07/02/2020
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What strings are best for Bigsby’s?

Guitars equipped with tremolo systems can offer so many creative and tonal opportunities, however, they can often suffer from issues such as tuning instability and string breakage. A Bigsby style bridge is one particular vibrato system that poses numerous problems for many players. Unlike other tremolos/vibratos, Bigsbys aren’t designed for severe ‘dive-bomb’ style tremolo use instead they’re revered by many tone hounds for their subtle shimmering vibrato. Having a Bigsby installed on your guitar can alter it’s playability quite considerably so a good setup for this style of vibrato is... Read More

Young guitar player on stage 16/01/2020

What are the best electric guitar strings for beginners?

When you’ve just started playing the electric guitar, the time will inevitably come when you need to change your strings. We’re well aware that if you’ve never bought a set of electric guitar strings before, the guitar string landscape can be very confusing. So many numbers, so many brands, information overload!!…. It can have you running for the hills! But fear not, we’ve created this guide on which electric guitar strings are best for beginners to help point you in the right direction. Let’s get cracking!…….. First thing’s first… Most... Read More

Ernie Ball Custom Gauge Single Strings 17/10/2019

Custom Gauge Guitar Strings

After months of beavering away, we recently announced the launch of our brand new ‘Custom Gauge Set Builder.’ This brand new feature has been designed to allow our customer’s the opportunity to create their very own set of strings where they can choose each individual gauge within their set. For many years, we’ve proudly stocked a large number of single strings from some of the worlds’ biggest string brands including D’Addario, Ernie Ball, Rotosound, Elixir and many more. And now, it gives us great pleasure to allow our customers this... Read More

Acoustic Guitar Strings 13/07/2019

What are the best acoustic guitar strings for beginners?

When you walk into your local music shop or scour our website searching for your first set of acoustic guitar strings, you’re met with a multitude of choice. As somebody who is new to the guitar, a huge number of options can feel quite overwhelming. We can sympathise as we’ve all been there and asked the same questions; “What on earth is a gauge?” “What do all these funny numbers mean?” “Should I just choose a set that’s called ‘Medium’ ” “Are the ones with colourful packaging better than the... Read More

GHS Nickel Rockers Low Tune 05/07/2019

What are the best guitar strings for blues?

The blues is such a broad genre of music that it would be difficult and wrong of us to say there is just one set of strings that are the best guitar strings for blues. Instead, in this guide we’ll offer up some thoughts and suggestions on the numerous facets of electric guitar strings and look at how your choice can help to benefit your development and style of playing the blues. Without further ado, let’s get into it…… Gauge Arguably, the most significant thing to consider when selecting a... Read More

Martin Monel Wound Acoustic Guitar Strings 29/05/2019
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What are Monel strings?

Monel….wasn’t he an impressionist painter? Hhhmm, close, but not quite! You’d be forgiven for asking what on Earth Monel strings are exactly? Well, below we’ll be running you through what these lesser-known strings actually are and see what all the fuss is about… so, let’s get cracking! So what is Monel? There are plenty of alloys that dominate today’s guitar string market so there’s a good chance many players will never have tried (or even heard) of Monel strings before. Monel is an alloy made from a mix of Nickel... Read More

Glass Bottleneck Slide 02/05/2019
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Slidin’ into the weekend like….

Forget the scorching temperatures of the 4-Day Easter Bank Holiday weekend, this past weekend was the one the Strings Direct team had been looking forward to for some time. Why’s that you may ask!? Well, a few weeks ago saw the return of the fantastic Tedeschi Trucks Band playing two sold out nights at the London Palladium and a few of the staff here were lucky enough to head there on Saturday night…. It was a real treat! Whilst these guys are no doubt a world class band, the real... Read More

Fender Bullet End Guitar Strings 17/04/2019
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What are Fender Bullet strings?

If you’ve scoured our site in the past and taken a look at our electric guitar sets section, you may have come across Fender’s range of electric guitar strings and in particular their Bullet strings. You’d initially be forgiven for thinking the term ‘Bullet’ is yet another adjective adopted by a string manufacturer to help describe the “Punchy”, “Penetrating” or “Explosive” tonal power of their strings, however, if you open up a set, you’ll soon see that there’s more to the Fender Bullet strings than just a name. So what... Read More

28/03/2019
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Are my strings wearing down my frets?

Hello and welcome back to the next instalment of the Strings Direct blog. In this entry, we’re going to talk about the relationship between your frets and your strings and in particular how they can affect one another. Your frets and your strings are like two best friends. They have a very close relationship… after all, they make contact with each other every time we play our guitar. However, whilst these two parts of the guitar are best buds…like many friendships, they can sometimes rub each other up the wrong... Read More