I know about the Eucerin trick, Sean Hurley swears by Vaseline, then there's the famous chicken grease stories, etc. Anybody ever try Jojoba oil? It has a "bio-similarity to human sebum" I've read.
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Jojoba to "age" new strings?
- Thread starter pbass2
- Start date
The real top-secret way to age your new strings is to throw them in the microwave. Set that thing to cook for a minimum of 5 minutes.
Second to that is to bury them in the bottom of a cat's litter box and dig them out after a week.
Third - and this one is the craziest idea yet - play them. It may surprise you to hear that you can knock some of that new string brightness out of your strings but naturally turning them into not-new strings.
Play them? Crazy talk.
Obviously I have too much time on my hands today, hence my post, but what the heck, makes sense--Jojoba is the oil most like human skin goo, apparently.
You shouldn't even joke about that - someone is gonna try that and wreck a microwave (and the strings).
Why settle for mere sebum, when you can go "all the way"?
I don't even like saying "sebum"....
I don’t get it. Not hating, just asking. Help a bassist of 40 years understand.
Why throw money at “new” strings if what you want is “old” strings?
I get muting, I get flats, I get thud. I don’t get replacing old strings you like with new strings you don’t like.
Kindly clue me in.
I like cold beer, for example. I’d never ever spill out a cold beer to make room in my glass for warmer beer and then have to refrigerate the glass. Help me understand without being too sassy.
Why throw money at “new” strings if what you want is “old” strings?
I get muting, I get flats, I get thud. I don’t get replacing old strings you like with new strings you don’t like.
Kindly clue me in.
I like cold beer, for example. I’d never ever spill out a cold beer to make room in my glass for warmer beer and then have to refrigerate the glass. Help me understand without being too sassy.
I hear that putting metal in a microwave makes a little miniature electrical storm. I'm sure it's on TikTok somewhere.
I usually just wear them out the old fashioned way by playing the snot out of them. But let's say you have a bass getting setup with new strings, and wanted to bring it to a session soon afterwards without much time to break them in, and you happen to hate brand new strings for recording(as I do). That's the only reason I'd screw around with any of this.
It’ll probably weld the strings to the cavity, and to each other. I used to work for a company that made specialized microwaves - on of our customers left a screwdriver in one once, and it welded itself to the cavity.
If it's lots of metal, yeah. I've been reheating my coffee for years, with the spoon inside, without problems
So you want to take old strings off, install new ones . . . . so they can sound like the old ones. . . . .
Some people don't have any old strings. I don't.
it's a way to quickly approximate what old strings would sound like.
Nothing wrong with a little learning experiment.
it's a way to quickly approximate what old strings would sound like.
Nothing wrong with a little learning experiment.
The shock will throw them back in time and history will be rewritten and Elon Musk will be some low-tier Java coding grunt drudging away in some anonymous contract firm and pbass2 will have bought Twitter and be a controversial figure for trying to kick out all the drummers.
Haha, I’ll play. I’ve applied Eucerin or mineral oil to flats that have audibly different bright/dark tonality from string to string. Every set of Sadowsky, LaBella and DR flats I’ve had has been really unbalanced out of the package and benefitted.
IME TI and D’Addario Chromes have much better balance so never done it to them and I don’t really want them to sound darker. Funny thing is I sweat like a pig all over except for my palms so my strings don’t really age on their own.
Thanks. I understand better. I like the thump on some songs but I’d never applied anything to get there. I like the sound of new rounds but I don’t like the sound of brand new flats, I like TI, LaBella Rotos and Chromes much better when they’ve had a beating and a little sweat so I’m now tempted to try this.
Rock on.
Here's an example: I buy a bass that has strings I don't like. I also need to do a proper setup on it to work with my strings of choice. I will always start with a new set in a case like that because old strings from another bass can be wonky--different witness points on the bridge saddles, whatever, they're compromised. But I get called for a session and man this new bass would be cool to bring, but I have no time to really break in the strings beforehand (and my thang is broken-in strings are preferable in the studio--YMMV, different strokes, etc). So, there ya go.
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