Recent content by Jimbo Williams

You'll love the A string when you get it. The boldness and clarity on those lower Helicores is great. My bass came with medium hybrids, but after trying Zyex and a set of LaBellas, I'm back on a full set of medium Helicore Pizz since I'm a bluegrasser and only bow occasionally. I was surprised...

Update: I'm back on my D'Addario Helicore Pizz Lights. The Supernils feel nice but I was missing that more defined sound especially on the lower strings. I think the Helicores are louder and require less work to get enough volume out of for acoustic jams. Also the Supernils are super fat and not...

My dad is a mandolin player in our band and being the great explainer that I am, I tried to tell him that the 4 chord is the sort of bring it home chord and the 5 chord is the really bring it back home to the one chord. If the note goes up a little, it's probably a 4, if it goes up a lot then...

Love my LaBella Supernils. My bass likes a low tension string. These strings turned a 2007 Chrstopher into a real boomer. You will hate them at first, but once you learn to play them they are great!

Whatever you do, don't play the wrong one. The last thing you want is for the bluegrass police to show up in the middle of the night like they did when I was playing B on the G string instead of the A string.

I pretty much only use the open G, mainly because my teacher played this way. I have tried the other g's but just don't get a good sound out of them. After my first few years of playing skinny, whimpy G strings I finally found a bigger, fatter G string and that being Labella Supernils. I know...

If your piezo is mounted on the g string side of the bridge, try moving it to the other side. Also make sure it's not wedged in too tight. Those things are real sensitive.

Picked up an Acoustic B50C yesterday. Went to Guitar Center to catch the sale with the intent of buying the B100C, then when I heard the smaller B50C I fell in love. Great tone, and way more volume than I'll ever need in a 15 person jam and playing small venues. I also tried a few other small...

Sorry, I don't have an answer for you, I was just wondering if the Supernils are plenty loud on the Shen. I have a Christopher with Helicores. They are loud but I'm looking for something with more of a bluegrass sound.

I agree. I saw a local band recently who had a guy filling in for the regular bassist and all he played was root-five all night and it sounded great. I heard tons of compliments on how good the guy was, even though he may have done 2 walkups the entire night. It gave the other players, who were...

I play both a Kay and 16 year old Christopher regularly and when I went to steel core strings on the Christopher I found that I can get just about as much of a booming tone out of the Christopher. Not quite a 100% matchup, but it's surprisingly loud. I went with Helicore Pizz lights and love...

Anytime my wife leaves the house and my daughter is gone I'm practicing. I do lots of ear training and practicing to music so it's kind of loud.

One excercise that I used when learning the different keys was to open up the music to a simple song, usually in the key of G, and just go down the list of keys, playing it in each key, mentally transposing it. That got me familiar with learning the 1,4 and 5 of each key. I highly recommend the...

For those of us who only play bluegrass and gospel grass, knowing the I,IV,and V in the keys of G,C,A,D,E and Bb is more than enough. Also knowing which notes are in each major scale comes in handy when learning walks between chord changes, but once you learn where the right notes are when...

I'm a baby powder user. It has to be the corn starch free powder to avoid clumping. Makes me smell like an infant though.