M-120 string question

I know there are a million string threads here already, which is about half a million too many for me to sift through for this incredibly specific question. I've got an M-120 and since I got it last year I've had Martin Silk & Steels on it. I use the guitar for fingerstyle playing in the vein of Nick Drake, John Fahey, Martin Carthy, etc (only very very badly). They feel great and mostly sound great but the low end is a little lacking. Any recommendations?

(Theoretically I'd love to just buy a bunch of strings and see what works, but I'm trying to be a little more diligent & frugal than usual...)

Errant Tiger said:

I know there are a million string threads here already, which is about half a million too many for me to sift through for this incredibly specific question. I've got an M-120 and since I got it last year I've had Martin Silk & Steels on it. I use the guitar for fingerstyle playing in the vein of Nick Drake, John Fahey, Martin Carthy, etc (only very very badly). They feel great and mostly sound great but the low end is a little lacking. Any recommendations?

(Theoretically I'd love to just buy a bunch of strings and see what works, but I'm trying to be a little more diligent & frugal than usual...)

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I play my M120E with D'Addario phosphor bronze mediums. It really brings out to lower end of the guitar. My only concern about that would be that I'm mainly a flatpicker. I do play some fingerstyle and would like to get into some stuff off Drake's Pink Moon album, but just haven't actually gotten around to it yet. I've never had an issue with a weak bass range on my M120E though, it might be a little harder on the hands to play with medium P.Bronze strings though.

If silk & steel aren't offering enough oomph, try silk & bronze (Martin, GHS, and John Pearse offer sets--the Martins are slightly lighter than the others). S&Bs also last a lot longer than S&S. And I would think that solid-core phosphor-bronze lights would do fine as well.

Thanks for the ideas! Anyone ever tried La Bella Silk & Steels, or the Ernie Ball Earthwood Silk & Steel Softs?

You might try John Pearse acoustic nickel lights. I liked them on a Larivee OO-03v and on a Martin 000-15M (all hog). But it looks like you are more into silk and steel?

I used all manner of S&S strings before I found S&Bs nearly twenty years back, and I doubt that any string that follows the usual S&S formula (silvered copper wrap over a core of nylon floss and a very thin solid wire) will sound very different from any other. With the S&B formula, that bronze wrap makes a lot of difference in sound and durability.

I do like both the tone and the feel of the silk & steels - when I switched over from the stock strings, I noticed a difference in sound as well as playability - my fingers no longer felt quite so clumsy! I guess I want to IMbalance the sound a little bit. Maybe a heavier set would help?

Also, on a slightly different but related note, I'm thinking about keeping everything tuned down to C to better accommodate my alto wife. Would S&S strings react noticeably different from S&B or other strings to this?

C is a long way to tune down, and the low tension of S&S is likely to make for a pretty floppy low end. If you go that route, you might want to string with a solid-core set, and maybe even go with standard solid-core strings. Even for the modest tension reduction of slack key's taro patch tuning (open G), I sometimes bump the gauge of the two E strings--and if I want to use a low C tuning, I definitely want a fatter 6th string.

Russell Letson said:

C is a long way to tune down, and the low tension of S&S is likely to make for a pretty floppy low end. If you go that route, you might want to string with a solid-core set, and maybe even go with standard solid-core strings.

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Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. This is probably a naive question, but could a guitar be set up so that the low tension wasn't an issue?

You should try out a set of D'Addario EFT16 FLAT TOP phosphor bronze strings. They are very dark , some would say dead sounding, strings. Those strings are polished down to reduce string squeak.
I sometimes go back to those strings. Playing with flesh and nail fingerpicking style will give you sort of that "Nick Drake" tone with those specific strings.

Errant Tiger said:

could a guitar be set up so that the low tension wasn't an issue?

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I may be contradicted by someone with more hands-on setup experience, but from what I understand, you're not going to decrease string flop via setup. Tension is tension, and it's established by scale length and string gauge/construction. So if you're going to keep a guitar in a low tuning and want to avoid that rubber-bandy sound, you're going to have to up the tension by increasing the string gauge/construction. On the other hand, such an arrangement might mean that you want your tech to set the guitar up to accomodate these factors--neck relief is going to change, and maybe intonation.

And my experience is that the low-tuning/higher-gauge combination yields a similar feel to standard-tuning/lower-gauge. But then, my hands are pretty adaptable--I play a range of guitars, from a flamenco to archtops with 14-56 or heavier strings.

BTW--to my ear, Nick Drake sounds like a guy who never changed his strings. It's something I used to hear on a lot of guitar-centric albums three and four decades ago. I think of it as the old-Gibson syndrome*: these very strings were good enough for grandpa and they're good enough for me.

* For some reason, almost every singer-songwriter cover photo from the 60s seemed to feature an old Gibson jumbo. Or maybe my memory is selective.

Well, I'm pleased to report that after sitting down with all our songs and a very cranky D46 tuned down to C (and CGCFGC), we've decided that it makes more sense to improve her singing rather than mess around with tuning so low. So I've decided to put La Bella Silk & Steels on the 120 and am just trying to figure out what to try on the 46, for maximum smoothness AND banging-out-ness. Maybe the Pearse Phosphor Silk & Bronze Lights...

Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions!