The Tennecaster & the Hankenstack – time well wasted...

I ain’t what you’d term an accomplished guitarist. After 25 years, I don’t even know any scales. Still, even as a southpaw, I’ve continued to play with bands, write songs, etc…

As with most things bearing/cursed with an infinite amount of variables, I’ve spent all that time searching for certain guitar sounds, or my own interpretation thereof – fuelled by a mix of luck, skint-osity, and spending hours on message boards, hunting down info… valves, pickups, tuners, speakers, pedals – you name it, I’ve Googled it, dissected it, bought it and played with ‘em like a toddler. Built speaker cabinets out of 1940s radio sets, filled low-cut nut slots with superglue to stop buzzin’ strings and all sorts of other malarkey…

All to stand in front of a good amp and approximate Eddie Phillips’ clang, Cyril Jordan’s whomp & jangle or Travis Wammack’s chickun-picken’…

Sometimes, you get very lucky, and given that there’s prolly a fair few RBPers who strum’n'wail, I thought I’d share an amazing find with ya. Handmade guitar strings from an old German, family-run firm called Pyramid, which are called Nickel Classics and cost about £7 a pack.

Pyramid are justly famous for their flatwound strings, which give an awesome Link Wray-style thump’n'bang or authentic percussion’n'shimmer to 12-string electrics. But the Nickel Classics are hands-down the finest set of strings I’ve ever played or heard.

As with all the roundwound nickel strings made from the 40s to the 60s, the Nickel Classics feature a round core and a thick wrap, as opposed to the ‘modern’ make-up of a hexagonal centre and a thin outside bit. Unlike the guitar hoodoo that can be found by the virtual yard on the net and splashed across a host of mags, which features a great amount of hyperbole and subjective bunkum, Pyramid’s claim that Nickel Classics will dramatically increase the quality of your guitar’s tone and sustain are entirely true.

I’ve put ‘em on a Gretsch-a-like I’ve been working on since January. Having tried almost everything (new tuners, switches, pickups, etc) to get it sounding ‘right’, I was ready to give up until I put a set of these Nickel Classics on. Wow. No annoying ‘zing’ like you get from a new set of ‘modern’ strings. No endless stretching to get them to stay in tune. ‘Perfect’ tuning easily achieved, and this kinda amazing authority to the sound – in fact, just like all of my fave guitar tones. These strings made the guitar come alive…

The La’s Lee Mavers, who reportedly was so afraid of modern electronic guitar tuners that he usedta get the band to use the burglar alarm at the rehearsal studio, had this thing about guitars reaching a natural state of ultimate playability – ‘dogstar’, he called it.

Ludicrous as it may sound, this does make sense, given that all git boxes – from Strads to Strats – are bits of metal/gut/nylon stretched over wood, and the latter naturally adapts itself (to not being a tree, basically) and gradually settles into its new form, loosening-up in response to the vibrations of being played and giving back an increase in the quality of the tone produced. Likewise, guitar strings do reach a lovely point where they stay in tune and have an appealingly zing-free tone. Ultimately, the strings and the body’s resonance do achieve Mavers’ mythical ‘dogstar’ state and this makes it veddy difficult to put down yer guitar and do the washing-up – you just wanna play which, after all, is the point.

Well, whap-dee-doo-dang and a ring-dang-doo, Pyramid’s Nickel Classics are instant ‘dogstar’, kids!