Ever hate strings so much you want them off right away?

[GlassToMouth]

I tried flat wounds once. They survived for about 20 minutes. Then they ended up in a van down by the river. I try stainless strings every year or two and they typically come off within a week. Tonally and comfortability for me are usually found with nickel or nickel plated. DR Sunbeam 45-105 for the Hamer Cruise, Dunlop Nickel Superbrights 40-100 for the Brubaker Brute. To each their own, but this is what I've settled on after trying so many different strings. I'm tempted to try the Dragon skins since some compare them to the Sunbeams.

 

[Moving Pictures]

D'Addario Halfrounds and Chromes, DR Fat Beams and Dean Markley Blue Steels. The Halfrounds and Chromes just don't feel right or sound good to me at all. For flats I tend to go for LaBella FL760's. Fat Beams just sounded all wrong even though they felt good, however I do like Hi Beams. Great strings! The Blue Steels were DOA on 3 packages in a row. Very weird. However I really like Dean Markley Helix strings, they really hit it out of the park with that string series. I like both the 5-string and 4-string sets.

 

[Low town]

I had this feeling when I bought a 2nd hand bass with flat-wounds - I hated the flats, though now I am addicted to flats.

I actually now despise playing basses with rounds.

 

[Jorge Estremera]

DR Sunbeams. They felt great but the tone just didn't work for me.

 

[TinyE]

Ernie ball cobalt - tore up my fingers, fender half-rounds - just plain crap

 

[RandalPinkFloyd]

GHS Tapewounds. Couldn't get those dreadful sounding things off fast enough.

 

[KingRazor]

I put on a set of D'addario Nickel Wound yesterday, and these damned things are so bright to the point of being clanky even with the mid and treble at zero.

I actually felt the exact same way bout those strings but after a week or so they broke in and sounded fine.

 

[Inertialsky]

I love DR strings. High beams and Low beams are awesome. With that said, I tried a set of those neon green strings and that bass got ZERO play time until I changed them. They felt horrible. Much worse than normal DR strings. Maybe I got a bad set... I dont know. I did buy them at a random Guitar Center in Portland.

 

[kdemello1980]

I, like many, many, many others, find D'Addario half rounds to be the worst strings money can buy. Maybe chromes are ok, but I'll never risk another D'Addario product to find out.

 

[eriky4003]

I put a set of flats on a Spector (converted) fretless. The jury is still out. Yes, I've lost the mwah sound out of the fretless. Maybe over the Xmas holidays I'll give it another try and see if it's something I like. If not, I've got two sets of roundwounds in stock.

 

[maturanesa]

Yeah. I put a set of Fender Pure Nickels once. I lost half of the volume and brightness. No way. I took them off and put it on my cheapo practice bass...

 

[Troph]

Everything I've tried by DR. It seems like every bassist under the sun hails them as the best ever, I can't stand them.

Yeah, well I can't stand whatever it is that you play. What was it that you play again?

Seriously though, I wonder how many of these "bad experiences" are repeatable observations, and how many are just one-off issues due to a manufacturing defect or large differences between configurations, etc?

A few years back I had never tried Chromes before, so I purchased some to install on a 5-string Am Std Jazz (come to think of it, I think Mike Lull threw them on after a setup), and wow I was not impressed. They were NOT smooth, they produced large amounts of fret clank (much more so than the nickel rounds they replaced), and I didn't like the apparent string tension either. They were gone within a couple weeks.

A few years later I bought a used 4-string Am Std Jazz that had flats on it. They were extremely smooth, quiet, and had reasonable tension, so out of curiosity I e-mailed the seller to find out what they were. Lo and behold, they were 2-year-old Chromes. That changed my extremely negative opinion of them to a "maybe I should give them another try".

Of course, I yanked them off that Jazz bass, because eventually I came to realize that no Jazz bass should be handcuffed with flats!

 

[oysteivi]

I stupidly bought a set of D'addario half rounds. Didn't like anything about them.

A few years ago, my parents gave me a set of GHS Bass Boomers for Christmas (to their defense, in the same gauge as the RS66 set I had wished for). The boomers felt very rough to me, bordering on totally unplayable. I didn't care for the sound, either, though that might partly be because they were on a Jazz bass while I'm used to playing a Precision.

I recently bought a new Squier Matt Freeman P bass. The Fender rounds that came with it sounded ok, but I didn't want the strings that strange people have fondled in the shop, so while waiting for my preferred Fender 9050L set to arrive from BSO, I tried out:

• A set of Rotosound flats. After 10 minutes of playing, these went to metal recycling and were replaced with
• a previously used set of La Bella Stainless Steel Roundwounds. I really liked these when I last used them, but that was before I really tried flats. Now they sounded tinny to my ear. They did however stay on for the week it took my new strings to travel to Norway.

Come to think of it, this means I've disliked about half the strings I've ever tried. I suppose I'm just being difficult.