String Wear Like You've Never Seen Before

joodan24

Im running Savarez Argentine 1510MF on 2 different guitars (Gitane DG310, Altamira M30D). In a matter of 15 to 20 hours, the winding on all 4 wound strings has almost completely worn through. The D string has totally worn through the winding to where there are separate segments of winding up and down the string. See attached pic . . .

I have never had this happen to any other, non gypsy jazz, string i have used in my life. Ive gone through 4 sets now. Bad production run? Normal? Other string options? . . . Is the secret to sounding like Django that he let his strings unwind?

Shout out to Strings and Beyond. They sent me 3 new packs of the same string to see if it was a bad batch. I will report wether or not the new strings do the same.

joodan24

20250218_173954.jpg

Forgot the pic

paulmcevoy75

I would not consider that normal. They last for a long time, they just get dead AF. People change them maybe more than other kinds of guitars I think, because of the deadness. But I don't find that they unwind.

When I'm making a nut I do sometimes nick the string with a file and then they definitely do unwind like that.

wim

Did you mean the G string? The D seems okay

littlemark

That's normal ish for me. I change my g string twice as often as other strings.

MichaelHorowitz

Never heard of that….occasionally someone will have some frets that are a little too sharp which will fray the string. Since this is happening on two different guitars I’m guessing you just got a bad batch. We’re shipping 100s of Argies a month for nearly 20 years and no one has ever had this happen.

billyshakes

I have had that exact thing happen to the wound G string with Argies. I don't know that it occurred in the time frame you indicate, but I will say that that string seems to be the trouble one. Must be related to the size of the string? Never had that happen on the thicker wound strings. I know it happened on my old Altamira. Maybe my Park too? But I tend to like them a bit deader for rhythm playing so I probably leave them on longer than others.

Thankfully, I happen to know a guy who can regularly supply me with Optima strings and I haven't noticed the problem on the DuPonts. ;-)

https://djangobooks.com/forum/discussion/19557/fs-optima-hot-club-gypsy-fire-strings

lux

Phil

I've used Argentine strings for 20yrs and they're the only gypsy guitar strings that have been consistently good. I tried other brands out of curiosity but they all had string unwinding problems, so I went back to Argies and never looked back.

Buco

Yeah, that's not all that unusual. You'll see that issue with G breaking, or breaking on the winding, has been mentioned several times on the forum over the years. I've had that happen with pretty much every brand except Optima, in my case as least. These strings are very light gauge, even the 11s set, compared to other acoustic guitar styles. And these guitars are played hard, aggressive vibrato is popular and so on, so that's that. Frets can exacerbate the issue if they're not nicely dressed and polished. Making sure the left hand is as relaxed as possible helps too. I'm sure in my case that's at least partially a reason why it stopped happening.

MikeK

You mentioned having played the strings for 15 to 20 hours, so I'm guessing that you may be expecting too much out of them. I've been using Argie 11's for many years (I buy 5 sets at a time from Michael here) and I've never experienced the unraveling of the g string or any other. And I play really hard, as anyone who has seen the "pickguard area" of my guitars can confirm. But I change mine after every 6 gigs these days (most of my gigs are 2 hours long, including the break). So with a little practicing each day and 2 guitars, I suppose I'm changing them after around 12 hours of hard use. I wonder if the unraveling would still happen if you changed them more frequently?