Cmon guys, you can't be this obtuse. Saying "you're just one person, not a market" is ridiculous. I REPRESENT a market. I mean, unless you're living under a rock, you know that 6 string basses exist. C strings are actually FAR CHEAPER to produce than B strings (which makes sense considering the materials cost). It can't be THAT HARD to switch it up, because there are in fact usually 2 or 3 options for C strings, when they actually decide to make them.
Like LITERALLY the only string line I've found where I can get CLOSE to the actual gauges I want for a relatively balanced set is the plain old D'Addario nickel rounds. That's the only one. I have to sacrifice on feel/comfort if I want to go with literally anything else. And I don't think I'm asking too much, I just want a 6 string set that sticks pretty close to 35 lbs per string. But basically every other set or even line of singles, somewhere there's a giant hole where one of the gauges should be (often in the A or D strings, or the aforementioned C string). For D'Addario nickels, that works out to 130, 100, 75, 55, 40, 28. And if you look at the sequence of numbers, there's kind of a nice logical progression from one to the next, which is what you want under normal circumstances. String sets with wildly varying gauges/tensions should be the ones for people with weird needs. Why would I want my A string to be 10 lbs heavier than anything else on the bass? That's freakin weird.
Frankly, most string companies could probably just ax their line of 65s and do 60s and 55s instead. If you start from a 45 G string, you would want the rest of a 4 string set to be 60/80/105 (or 110). Those are all in the neighborhood of 43 pounds. A 65 is FIFTY ONE POUNDS, or about 8 lbs heavier than your G string. A 45/65/85/105 set is 42.8, 51.3, 48.4, and 40.3. That's an 11 pound swing from light to heavy, but in no particularly order or with literally ANY rhyme or reason. WHY would you want that to be the "standard"?
A 40/60/80/100 set is not much better at 33.7, 42.9, 42.0, 36.5. So what are these gauges even based on? Literally nothing. If they went from a lighter top somewhat linearly to a heavier bottom, that would be logical. MAYBE string companies should actually just reinvent and start almost from scratch and rethink what they do and why they do it. It's 2022. Even "balanced tension" sets are usually not actually that balanced. But they're better than the regular sets.
I also think string companies err on the side of heavier when it should be the other way around. I mean, are there people out there using 70s for their D string? That's 60 lbs and seems completely insane and unplayable, and your neck is going to take such a beating that way. Imagine a 6 string with those tensions? 360 pounds! My 6 string is in the neighborhood of 200, and I STILL need to make seasonal truss rod adjustments. I like a light action, I'm not some caveman with giant bear paws, but even so, it seems like sets targeting 35, 40, and 45 lbs should cover the VAST majority of players, with very few outliers that want to go heavier. So that would be 18 strings per line (and maybe a couple others for more specific purposes). D'Addario XL nickel rounds in "long" scale (ie for regular basses), they have about 30 strings. But you have about 6 somewhat viable options for B ranging from 26 to 42 lbs, but your high C you only have 3.
The sizes themselves are kind of meaningless from a musical standpoint, it's really the tensions that matter, but they clearly aren't being made with tensions in mind, and that's why so many players are unhappy with what's being offered. A 5 lb per string average difference between sets seems like a pretty good sweet spot between being so small that people wouldn't necessarily notice and it would cost a fortune to have so many options, and going so wide that people are stranded in the middle.
Dear string manufacturers...
Please don't give me any more choices when it comes to strings.
I'm confused enough as it is.
Thank you.
But see this hits at it from the other side. How many varieties of "flats" do we really need? Etc.. I think most people would be thrilled if they could just get a set of nickel rounds, SS rounds, chromes, and nylons, and in an actually empirically designed range of maybe 3 or 4 gauges. That's 96 strings if we assume each set will cover up to 6 string basses. The D'Addario catalog is like 13 pages of 50 or so per page. They surely have more than 96 bass strings NOW, but I still can't find what I want in anything besides nickel rounds. So maybe they need fewer oddball lines (I still have NFC what the NYXLs are supposed to be, or why they cost twice as much as XLs) and to just instead make sure each line they DO have is more comprehensive. And then yes, it's great to offer a few oddball things like Bass VI, etc... that are maybe not AS varied. But if it's not for a niche instrument/usage, make sure you have tensions to cover the people that are trying to buy those lines.
