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On behalf of Expert Village, my name is Jim Dufresne and I'm here to tell you about acoustic
guitar amplification. I've got four different kinds of guitars sitting around me right now.
The acoustic guitar, Epiphone electric, typical electrical guitar Strat, and classical guitar.
Each one requires a different kind of string. Your jazz box likes to have the flat-wound
strings. They have a nice bassy sound to them, nice and round sound to them. Electric guitars
typically have very light strings because one of the requirements because one of the
requirements of playing an electric guitar is you bend a lot of strings. Back in the
old days, we used to take black diamond strings and we would put the first string where the
second string is, put the second string where the third string is, and so on, we'd get rid
of the sixth string, throw it away, or give it to your little brother, let him go play
with it. And we'd buy a banjo string and use that for the first string because slinky strings,
thin strings, were not available back in the old days. Oh, I'm really telling my age now.
So that's how we used to get our electric guitar strings. See, they're very light, usually
of a round-wound nature. Now, the acoustic guitar strings, they're wound in bronze, except
for the first two which are plain. The bigger the string, the better the sound. That's true
on all the guitars. The bigger the string, the better the sound. Now, if your strings
are too big, your guitar will start falling apart, start collapsing on itself. And if
your string is too big, you can't bend it like the electric guitar strings, so that's
why you want to have light strings on the electric guitar. I know some people, myself
included, who tend to use a little bit heavier string on the electric guitars, looking for
tone. Stevie Ray Vaughan likes to use a big guitar string on his electric guitars.