Strings for a Resonator Guitar

[Mandobart]

After much searching, playing, posting and reading I ordered a Gold Tone Paul Beard signature round neck resonator, directly from Gold Tone. It should ship soon and should arrive in a few weeks.

I don't play with a slide much, though I may move more in that direction now. I do mostly flatpicking and fingerstyle currently. What strings do the reso players out there like on these guitars? I favor mediums (.013) on my guitars. I really like Ernie Ball aluminum bronze on my Eastman archtop. The HD-28 plays and sound great with Curt Mangan round core phosphor bronze. I really like La Bella silver plated strings on my old spider bridge resonator mandolin.

Thanks for your suggestions!

[blue]

I go with bulk sale price Daddario EJ strings, but I will throw on whatever is on sale. Inexpensive Martins, whatever.

I guess my point is these guitars have a lot personality, and you have to really really try to get away from that personality, so it doesn't matter as much as on a sweetly voiced Hog sided 12 fret.

I would definitely try something phosphor bronze as a starting point. If you like it, you're set. If you want to mellow it go nickel. Want an edge go 80/20.

If you are like me, you'll decide you'd rather change strings every week, and at $3 a pack, sale, middle of the road PB strings are good enough.

[Wade Hampton]

The choice of strings is somewhat determined by the playing style you end up using on the instrument, and by the tunings you find yourself gravitating towards. From what you wrote in your post it sounds as though you’re planning to use the standard EADGBE tuning, at least to begin with.

But whenever you take on an instrument that’s as different from a regular acoustic guitar as a resonator guitar, you might find that your initial plans will change a bit once you get used to it. It takes a while before you get enough perspective to recognize what its strengths and weaknesses are.

That’s definitely what happened to me when I took delivery of my McAlister acoustic baritone guitar the day before Thanksgiving in 1999. A lot of the assumptions that I initially thought were going to be how I’d use the baritone turned out to be less practical than I had imagined.

It took me just over a year to figure out how to use the baritone most effectively, what string gauges and tuning would work best, and so forth.

You might be aware that in the first few years of this century I was deeply involved with the National Reso-Phonic Guitar Company as they developed what became the National RM-1 resonator mandolin. But I didn’t find learning how to use a resonator mandolin as challenging as figuring out what would be the most effective way to use the baritone. In part that’s because I didn’t have to order custom-wound strings for the mandolin the way I had to in order to figure out what gauge would work best for the baritone’s low B string.

The more important reason that I caught onto it faster was because using a wood-bodied biscuit bridge resonator mandolin gave me what I’d always wanted in a mandolin: more sustain, just a hint of a natural built-in reverb, and of course enough volume and projection to be heard even when hamfisted banjo players were playing as hard as they could and stepping all over everybody else’s solos.

So once you familiarize yourself with your new resonator guitar’s strengths, weaknesses and oddball little quirks, you’ll start figuring out how to use it most effectively for the way you play and for the music that you’ll start to have falling from your fingertips when you play it.

In other words, it’s going to be a process of trying a bunch of different things on it and figuring out which works best for you. Don’t be surprised if you find that it leads you in a completely unexpected direction.

Hope that makes sense.


Wade Hampton Miller