Step into any guitar store and you'll find D'Addario electric guitar strings and acoustic guitar strings. Since its inception in ’74, the brand has positioned itself as a market leader, luring legions of stars – including Nile Rodgers, Nita Strauss, Joe Satriani, Yvette Young, and many more – into its artist ranks over the years.
One of the secrets behind its success? “We do a great deal of testing with our artists,” discloses Jim D'Addario, the chairman & CEO, in the new Guitarist edition. However, not all guitarists are as reliable as others when it comes to string science.
“I’m not going to say that some are ‘better’ at it, but they’re more valuable testers because they actually take a more objective and scientific approach to evaluating what you’re asking them to test,” D'Addario adds.
“Other people are sometimes not as discriminating – or sometimes overly discriminating. They’re great players, but they’re not great testers, right?”
Pat Metheny is one such artist who D'Addario relies on for analyzing the finer details. The jazz fusion virtuoso, who has been a D'Addario artist since 1982, has been instrumental in collaborating with the brand to – as he astutely puts it – “investigate possibilities of strings and what they can be”.
“I don't think I ever changed the strings on my [Gibson ES-]175 from the time I bought it until maybe I had started playing with Gary [Burton],” Metheny once shared in an interview with D'Addario.
“And I kind of liked how they sounded. They were these flatwound strings that were really dead. And so I asked Jim and everybody, ‘Could you make a string that sounds kind of dead?’ And they did.
“I was like, ‘Oh, that's cool that it's possible to have a relationship with a company – and genius inventor – where some of these ideas or thoughts or methods could manifest themselves.’ That began this thing of what we used to call the dead wounds.”
Metheny concludes, “We're on the hunt for the best possible solution. So it's great to have the resources of the company to investigate possibilities of different ways of thinking about strings and how they can be used, and it's something I really value.”
For more from D'Addario, plus new interviews with Rosanne Cash and Brian May, pick up issue 514 of Guitarist at Magazines Direct.
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