| Stringing an ABG - A Guide
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Hi I hope this proves useful! Just some thoughts!
Decide to look around to see what other Bass applications were doing to see if I could glean something useful.
1 Contrabass Guitars, use silver on Nylon core strings, i.e as a ordinary classical, but thiker. But The Guitar ensemble plays care fully arpeggioated, interlocked music where the Contrabass completes the chord and all the instruments have equal loudness and one doesn't dominate the other. i.e A bass note is not equal to a Guitar chord. If the Guitars played loud chords as in Flamenco they contrabass might not be heard....
2 Which brings me on to Flamenco-esque, situations where a Double bass or Guitarrón is used, which has steel cored Flatwound strings.
3 An Acoustic Bass Guitar at best will have a grand concert body, so the loudness can be no more that that. Now just imagine that you have 3 Guitars. 2 strum loudly and the other is playing a solo. That guitar won't be heard because the bottom E won't stand out against the bottom E of the strummed guitars, so the ABG strung with Bronze wound on steel will have the same problem, unless the other 2 guitars arpeggio-ate or quieten.
So in terms of these are the options:
Contrabass Guitar strings: Great tone but not loud enough
Bronzewound on steel: Louder but we have already explored the problem
Thomastik Acoustic Bass, Bronze on Nylon combines the best of the above, a growling warm tone. IMO the best "Sounding" but not as loud 'cause of the Nylon core
Tape Wound the trouble with these is they were designed to be used on an electric bass, hence the steel core,to mimic a DB. this was done by deadening certain harmonics. A by-product of this is that the are quiet, not a problem if you use a magnetic pick-up and amp, but a big one on a ABG!
Flat wounds The steel core makes them loud as the bronzewound, but not as "bright" sounding as the bronze.
Now given that as explained before, Double bass and Guitarrón, use flatwounds, and that they will shift air as much as a bronze wound, but will sound different enough to maybe find some sonic space, these might be the best option if you a re playing mostly acoustic.
If you are plugging in I would definitely recommend the Thomastik Acoustic bass, Bronze on Nylon core, ones that I'm currently using! | 
