Bronze or Steel wire without winding like Surbahar or Sitar Strings

[Mustafa Umut Sa]

I bought surbahar - bass sitar - strings from india and I found they were bare steel or thick - 1mm -bronze wire without winding. I found they are incredibily good , exotic , deep and harmonic sounding.

Anyone sells bare bronze or steel wire as bass guitar strings ? Any bass guitar manufacturer uses these wires. Anyone used ?

Best,

Mustafa Umut Sarac
Istanbul

 

[HaphAsSard]

I bought surbahar - bass sitar - strings from india and I found they were bare steel or thick - 1mm -bronze wire without winding. I found they are incredibily good , exotic , deep and harmonic sounding.

Anyone sells bare bronze or steel wire as bass guitar strings ? Any bass guitar manufacturer uses these wires. Anyone used ?

Best,

Mustafa Umut Sarac
Istanbul

Here's the answer I gave three years ago, to a similar question you asked in this thread:
https://www.talkbass.com/threads/th...e-cr18ni8-and-diy-strings-no-winding.1485082/

Plain (unwound) metal strings become too stiff and inharmonic to work well as musical instrument strings past a certain diameter (unless the scale length becomes very long). That is why wound strings (which can achieve a large mass but retain flexibility) exist at all; I think .026" is the largest plain steel guitar gauge available. Regarding your 040 bronze string, I don't know the note to which it is tuned on the surbahar, but I'm pretty sure it is higher than the lowest notes of the bass guitar.

I suppose you could string a bass guitar with all plain steel strings: 011p - 015p - 020p - 026p; however, it would be extremely low-tension (and the truss rod would have to be loosened significantly), the lowest two strings would probably not sound very good, and, most importantly, the tuning would be one octave up ("piccolo tuning").