Do DB strings ever break?

[SottoVoce]

. . . This is probably a stupid question but I'm just curious. I'm looking at all the rosin stuck on my school's bass strings and all the dents in the strings and I wonder.

[Chris Fitzgerald]

Yes. I saw a friend of mine break one on the first set of a gig last year. He didn't have a spare, so he played the next three hours on a 3 string bass. He was P@$$ED!!!

[arto alho]

SWEETSOUND: Yes They Do Break. Happened to me a coupla times during the gig. The other time I was lucky to have a spare set in my gig bag, the other time it was E string & I had to play limb lines with three strings the rest of the night. Usually DB strings don´t snap as easily as BG strings, but when they do, it can be dangerous due to the tension, and can cause the top to split too....
There are ( naturally ) different kinds of strings, for example gut strings are teend to break more easily. A month ago I was in the audience in jam session. The bass player ( who BTW comes from Florida, USA ), had gut strings, and in the second song of the first set he broke the A.
Man, was HE p****d off, ´cause he´d brought those strings from the States!!
So, we got to his car ( after 3 beers I was not able to drive ), drove quickly to my home, got a spare A ( Spirocore ), drove back, changed the string and he finished the first set...missed only for tunes in between. In the second set I jammed with the band with his bass, and playing with 3 guts and a Spirocore A mixed in between them was VERY strange.

[SottoVoce]

So how long do the strings last, normally?

[olivier]

Normally DB strings do not break (except gut) and you change them when A) you're tired of your old strings (YMMV), and B) you got dow for that.

[bassdude]

Gut strings tend to get frayed and need to be changed. Some times a mouse will try to eat a gut string. I have one bass where the wood part of the peg was chewed to get to the string. I sure that the mouse sustained massive injurys when the string broke.