Selecting an 80/20 bronze acoustic guitar strings set requires many considerations. Your string type should depend on your playing style and your guitar.
For instance, selecting a medium gauge set would be most suitable if you play blues frequently and rely heavily on string bends. Other considerations could include core material type and material.
Gauge
A guitar string’s gauge refers to its thickness. Measurable in thousandths of an inch, it plays an integral role in its playability; thicker strings require greater tension for fretting, while thinner ones may be easier.
Your 80/20 bronze acoustic guitar strings choice depends entirely upon personal taste and the desired sound from your acoustic guitar. However, it’s worth remembering that numerous factors influence tone, including guitar and pickups.
Thick strings tend to provide more sustain and are generally louder than thinner strings due to retaining more energy when plucked, taking longer for it all to dissipate when plucked. Unfortunately, thicker strings can be more challenging for beginners since they require greater pressure when bent – this could result in finger fatigue, which is especially distressful in beginner guitarists.
There is a range of string gauges, allowing you to experiment until you find one that feels perfect for you. Some sets of acoustic guitar strings feature mixed gauges so that you can have both tension- and flexibility-wise strings in one set – for instance, light top and heavy bottom strings can have similar tension, while lighter top strings make bending them easier.
Material
Steel strings are typically constructed using plain steel monofilament wound into their desired size and shape, with additional treatments to enhance feel or sound characteristics. Some manufacturers employ special treatments for D’Addario XS plain strings; for instance, their thinner version of the technology used on NY Steel electric strings extends their longevity.
Coating 80/20 bronze acoustic guitar strings or brass coating is another way to improve their feel and tone, creating more subtle strings for specific genres of music. Bronze or brass strings tend to produce warmer tones than steel ones, which may work better in specific genres of music.
Nylon strings are also widely used on acoustic guitars and come in several varieties. Clear nylon strings offer a crisp and bright sound, while black nylon strings offer a mellower, rounder tone suitable for fingerstyle guitar. Some brands even provide hybrid nylon/steel string combinations that combine their benefits.
Coating
Polymer coating on acoustic guitar strings extends their lifespan and keeps dirt from degrading their tone quality, which is great news for players who hate changing them now and then. Furthermore, they keep out dirt and gunk that might erode its tone quality.
Manufacturers can customise the thickness of their coating layers for their strings, which impacts how much it influences their tone. Thinner coatings tend to be more transparent to changes in tonality, while thicker ones may dampen down the overall tone and feel of strings.
Some brands coat the winding wire of wound strings before it wraps around their central core, while Elixir coats strings after they have been created – like protective socks for your strings! Take time to experiment with various coated sets; differences in their sound could be dramatic.
Tension
Strings are under intense tension, which allows them to vibrate and produce sound. As more tension is applied, so is its pitch of sound production – this allows for easy tuning on guitar strings.
Heavy sets of strings tend to be more challenging for most guitarists to play due to increased tension and their subsequent resistance to being bent, but it’s essential to keep in mind that your acoustic neck was designed with this tension in mind, so long as you don’t constantly tighten and loosen them (which could result in string breaks), everything should work just fine.
As a way of testing out tension differences among different sets of acoustic strings, a straightforward approach to testing them out is by gradually switching one string at a time from light to medium and heavy – starting with light, then medium and heavy sets before switching all at once – until finally moving up to heavy sets. Doing this lets you understand how each string feels and sounds under various amounts of pressure, which is an integral component of playability.