Lauren Bateman shares her string choices for warmer tone and easier playing. She uses 11-gauge phosphor bronze on acoustic guitar instead of 12-gauge bronze, and D'Addario EXL125 hybrid nickel-wound on electric for bending flexibility and thick rhythm sound. Coated strings last longer near the ocean.
So students ask me all the time, Lauren, what are your favorite guitar strings to make your guitar sound so awesome? So I'm going to go over a few of my favorites in this lesson. But did you guys also know that you could make your guitar easier to play by changing your strings? We're going to talk about how to do that next.
So I want to start off by preferencing that guitar strings are a personal preference thing. I've used lots of different types of strings over the years, and I've definitely tried some new ones even in recent years and made some changes as well. Part of it will depend on where you live, and I'm going to go over that and why I use the strings that I live because I live in an area by the ocean where there's a lot of salt in the air. So I make different string selections based on where I am. But for a lot of them, it really doesn't matter the brand. It's really the size of the strings. So right here, I have what are called 12. All right. These are light gauge strings and a lot of acoustic guitars, including my tailor. My tailor came with 12s, and I'm going to be switching them out to the strings I'm going to show you in a little bit. But I just want to let you know that while these are great guitar strings, these ones are actually the 8020 bronze. I don't particularly use these on my guitar because I think they sound too bright. I don't like the tone. I like a warmer tone on my guitar, so I use something a little bit different. But the 12s, they're thicker strings, and when you have a thicker string, it actually makes playing your guitar harder. So imagine you're trying to play this A chord, all right, or this C chord, and it's getting muted, and maybe your fingers look good, but you're like, I just can't press this string down hard enough, especially on that a chord. You know, that first finger ends up all the way in the back of the fret, and you're like, I just can't push that string down hard enough. All right? And you really got to press hard to get that string. Well, a lot of guitars, they come with these thicker strings, and they're actually harder to press down, which is why I tell a lot of my students, particularly older students and beginners just getting started, that they should switch out their guitar strings for something a little bit thinner entered the guitar strings that I like to use. So I have two different versions here. They're both d'. Addario's. I use d' Addario strings. I used to use elixirs, but I felt when I was performing live, for whatever reason, I always broke the strings very quickly and very easily. And I switched over to d', Addario and I didn't seem to have that problem anymore. So I've been a Dia Dario person for probably, I don't know, 20 plus years now or close to that. Okay. I'm a lot older than I look. All right. So I use extended life strings. You don't have to. They. They make non coated strings. The reason I like the coated strings is because I live by the ocean, so my strings tend to rust out pretty quickly because of all the salt that's in the air here. So I like to use the extended play. I feel like I get to. They get to last longer. They corrode way less slowly than if I used an uncoated string. These ones here, the black one is just the extended life, and this one is a new one. I just saw this. I've never tried these strings before, but these are maximum life. They're a smooth feel versus the natural feel. So I'm interested to. To see the difference between these two. But they're both phosphor bronze, so I don't use 8020 bronze because I think it has a very, very bright sound. And for some people, you might want that. I particularly don't like that for my ear. That's where personal preference comes in. So I really like the phosphor bronze as a much war tone, and I just think it makes my guitars sound better. I asked the tech what my tailor came with, and they are phosphor bronze strings. I knew because of the warmth, it just sounded great. They're my favorite guitar strings. It's good enough for a tailor. It's good enough for my crafter and all the guitars that I use. And because these strings are 11s, they're just a little bit thinner. These are custom like strings. They're just a little bit thinner. They make the guitar easier to play, particularly the bar chords. I don't know about you guys, but you hate those bar chords especially. Especially that F bar chord. You tend to mute those bottom two. The B and E string. See, you even heard I muted it here. So having those custom light strings really helps me with making sure that my bar chords ring out as best as possible. Now, before I show you guys what my favorite electric guitar strings are, leave a comment below to let me know what your favorite strings are. What you've experimented with. I would love to hear what you guys are playing with on your guitars now. These guitar strings I settled on within the last couple years since the pandemic. I used to just play with straight nines. And nines are thin. They're the light version of electric guitar strings. And the reason I had to do that is because with tens, again, they're just a little bit thicker. But when it came to bending strings, I found it was very hard for me to bend in pitch. It just. I didn't have enough hand strength to get the bends in pitch. So I found these really cool nickel wound hybrid strings. So what they are is they are super light strings on the top, which. So these bottom three strings, the thin strings, they're super lights, they're extra thin, which makes bending much easier for me. But these top three strings, the fat strings, are actually just regular strings. So the thing with the electric guitar, usually a lot of times you're playing power chords, right? So you're playing these power chords.
And the thing with power chords and playing rhythm, the thicker the strings, the beefier the sound. So having thin strings on the top, you can lose some of that thickness of the sound. So these hybrid strings really help to balance that out. I was able to play lead guitar much better. I was able to bend my strings in pitch. But not only that, when I went back to rhythm, I would have that nice beefier sound on the top strings because you really don't bend. Like if you're bending these top strings, you know, you might do like a little quarter bend or something on the top string, but usually not doing like, you know, whole note bends on the top strings, depending on what you're playing. But. So that's why I go with the D' Addario Hybrid EXL125 strings. They're great. I haven't been able to find them coated recently, so I use the uncoated versions. But if you're looking for good balance strings, those ones will definitely help you out. You guys enjoyed this video on my guitar string recommendations. Then I highly recommend you go check out this video over here where I'm going to talk about guitar picks, what I recommend for beginners, acoustic and electric guitar, as well as some of my favorites. So I'll see you guys in that lesson right over there.
