D’Addario CEO claims it’s ‘impossible’ to tell what strings someone is using just by listening to them
Some discerning tone hounds might claim they can identify what kind of strings a guitarist is playing from a distance, but no less than the head of one of the world’s most popular and respected string brands says it’s ‘impossible’.
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In an interview with Billboard, Jim D’Addario reflects on the company’s recent 50th anniversary and is asked if he can tell if a guitarist is using his company’s strings or not.
“No, that’s impossible,” he insists. “There are a lot of good strings out there that sound good. It’s very hard to discern that just from listening to it on the radio.”
However, while it might be hard to tell the difference in a band set-up, one area where he says you can see the difference in a meaningful way is the environmental impact of the strings in question. Specifically, D’Addario credits the brand’s move from individual packaged strings to using colour-coordinated ball ends packaged in a single bag has had a significant positive environmental impact over the last 30 years.
“In the early 1990s, a package of strings had an envelope for each of the six strings — a paper envelope for each one, identified for each note, in a vinyl pouch with a fancy label,” he explains. “So there was a minimum of eight pieces of packaging; sometimes there was a little advertisement as well. My daughter Amy was in high school, and they were studying environmental friendliness and recycling and packaging, and I was changing my strings on the bed and I had all this garbage when I was done. She said, ‘You should really do something about that, that’s really criminal, you’re putting so much junk in the waste-stream just to change a set of strings.’
“So it got me thinking. I came up with a system of colour-coding the ball end on the string a different colour, then coiling those together in one corrosion-resistant plastic bag and having them colour-coded, so the silver one is this note and the brass one is this note. It eliminated 75% of the packaging. Since that time, we’ve saved billions of trees and millions of pounds of carbon not released into the atmosphere. That was one of the things that distinguished our strings. That’s one way we can tell onstage if our strings are being used. Otherwise, it’s very difficult. You can put branding on the package but when they’re playing on stage you can’t see it.
Elsewhere in the interview, he adds: “Most people are very apathetic about their strings, and they usually listen to their teacher, or an artist that’s endorsing the product, to get them to try our strings. The ones that know really know ours are better — and consistent.”
D’Addario also comments on how the music market has changed since the company first started. He estimates that the musical instrument business is declining by 2-3 per cent every year.
“It’s quite different,” he says. “We also make drumheads and drumsticks and snare wires and guitar straps and cables. We make drumheads for acoustic drums and drumsticks and other accessories for drummers. The acoustic-drum market is 40-60 per cent of what it was in 2004. Drums have been digitised. Instead of 20,000 drumheads a day, we’re only making 10,000. The other thing is the guitar was really the solo instrument, but it’s not anymore. You don’t hear a guitar solo in every hit; you hear repetitive rhythms and electronic sounds and synthesised sounds.
“We’ve seen this so many times — in the early ’90s, it was video games, and for three or four years, the guitar market didn’t have much growth. But then it came back. The acoustic guitar market was in the tank for the whole decade of the 1980s, and “MTV Unplugged” happened, then bingo, the acoustic guitar took off again. It always comes back.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
