Flatwound strings

Jbird

Jbird

Kick Henry Jackassowski
I've never played a guitar with them, would they do ok for hard rock/metal, or are they primarily for jazzy stuff?

Just curious about them. I have played a bass or two that had flat wounds, but never a guitar.

I'm thinking of loading one of my guitars up with a set, just to try them idn_smilie
 
I've messed with them over the years a few times. They take a lot of the brightness off of your sound. I kind of think they sound like my tone knob is cranked down a bit. They are really smooth feeling and I find the mix of the smooth texture and stiffness in the strings makes grabbing and bending a string really hard. I guess you could play rock and metal with them, but the weird feeling on bending might make some rock/metal applications harder work than a regular round wound string.
 
very smooth/easy on the calluses, less string noise

as for tone mostly you hear a difference only when playing clean.

I use 11s and replace the wound G with an unwound one. bending isnt that much harder but you have to bend more to get to the same pitch and that is annoying.

they tend to last longer too. they are not as bright as round wounds are but rounds lose there brightness where flats stay consistent longer. You know when you first put new strings on how bright they tend to be, but that goes away after a few days, flats dont do that.

you can play any music with them, but jazzers , surf and country dudes tend to like them

one advantage they have is they are slightly smaller per gauge, so for example you may not have to widen your nut to go from 10s to 12s, and also some vintage fender tuners can only accept up to 52 or 54 on the low E but flats with smaller diameter can fit.
 
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I've fiddled with them from time to time in my quest for vintage tone, with varying success. Had Pyramid flats on my Rickenbacker to get a kind of early Beatles vibe going, and that was all right. Then I tried flats on my Strat, and they sounded so dreadfully dull and lifeless that I immediately took them off.

On a 12-string though, they're absolutely wonderful, and I highly recommend them for that particular usage.
 
The upside I forgot to mention is that they make sliding barre type chords around really easy and fast...and no squeak. It might be kind of cool for some types of metal with lots of sliding power chords.
 
i had an old Gibson ES-125 that i used flat wounds on, and the combination of the flats with that gnarly old P90 was really cool through the little old Fender Champ i have. i ended up always playing stuff like Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits on it. i couldn't imagine playing hard rock or metal on a guitar wound with flats, but that's just me. i thought bending was a pain with flats. here's a pic of the guitar (with flats).

w49GibsonES125-003.jpg
 
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I would not trust anything but these on any archtop I own... plus they have a picture of my old boss on the package...

gb112650.jpg


I would never think of using flat wounds for anything other than Jazz / RB

Everything else is covered by these:

SGHSST.jpg
 
I have a few guitars with flats... They have their place.
Thomasik flats are very nice, if you're going to give them a shot.
You don't want to try poorly made ones..... Been there done that.
If you want to give them a good fair shot, you have to go with good ones :)
 
I recently put flatwounds on my tele. Really took some getting used to. I think my tele has small frets and the flats made it feel fret less. Now that I'm used to em. I dig em.
 
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