Cheap argentines? The Asian connection

krzys · June 29

Due the French occupation, Selmac styles guitars made their way to Vietnam and were adapted with scalloped necks to play vọng cổ.

The style itself has a lot of similarities to gypsy jazz in that a 100 year old 'standard' is played with various changes that the musicians simultaneously improvise over with a modified pentatonic scale. They also employ rest stroke picking with a floating wrist.

What I thought you all would find interesting is that the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th strings are quite similar to argentines. They are quite light, usually with .042 for the low E, but come in all gauges. They have a steel core with a silver plated copper winding and are preferred for their flexibility and ease of bending, so I think they might be a copy of the original argentine silver plated strings. They even wrote 'Argentine' right on the packet. You can buy a pack of 100 single strings for 350,000vnd (13.75usd).