Gibson Les Paul Bass Question (1992 with flower pot inlay)

[4stringer77]

At least you don't end up with silk and overwrap on the E and A string saddles. Even the two point bar bridge on my 66' EB3 has better ball end to saddle string travel than those 3 pointers.

[amptech]

That´s why I never been a big fan of the three point. When you set up the guitar  just the way you like it and found the
perfect strings for it... My main axe for the moment is a ´63 EB0F with a 3P installed. The .045-.100 chromes is my favorite set for this one, and I have to remove the silk wrapping with my dremel... It ends up a bit wooly, but I just dip the ends in some fast drying black enamel paint  - and I get rid of the silly D´addario ball colours as well.

[Psycho Bass Guy]

I've got the same Chromes on mine (they just came in an Ernie Ball package ) and the silks don't get anywhere near the nut or the bridge saddles. They all stop about 2" past it. The extra you're paying for the D'darrio name must go toward extra silk wrapping and ball end paint.

[uwe]

I've played a few with the Warwank bridge. I prefer the three-point, though in all honesty, those basses were setup less than optimum. My gripe with the Warwick is in changng the strings. Even when I was doing 5-10 guitar and bass setups a day, I could never string a Warwick without the damn ball ends popping loose from the tailpiece. For the first few, I chalked it up to inexperience. After that, I just got pissed off. I never could find a 'trick' to hold them in place while bringing them up to tension; the slack always pushed them out the back of the slot and they'd pop right off. Eventually, I just started making the people who brought them in hold the string while I tuned them up until it had enough tension to not fall out, but I will forever hate them and ALL open top-slot bridges.

John (Fertig) once said the Warwick bridge is overengineered - there is more than a grain of truth in that.

[4stringer77]

I've got the same Chromes on mine (they just came in an Ernie Ball package ) and the silks don't get anywhere near the nut or the bridge saddles. They all stop about 2" past it. The extra you're paying for the D'darrio name must go toward extra silk wrapping and ball end paint.

I live 15 minutes away from a juststrings warehouse so I always buy from them online and pick them up to save on shipping. They sell Chromes for less than the Ernie Balls and at the moment chromes are on sale for even cheaper. The Ernie Balls don't come in short scale either. That's cool that they use less silk though. I might have to check out a set after my chromes die out in another year or two or three. Hope I can still remember.

[Psycho Bass Guy]

In case I wasn't clear, the EB Group III Flatwounds are the same strings, made by D'darrio OEM for Ernie Ball, one of the few strings they don't make themselves. In music stores, they're usually half the price of their "official" brethren.

[4stringer77]

Yup that's the comparison I was talking about in my last post. ECB81 chromes are $23.61 regularly on juststrings and now on sale for $21.25. They also come in a short scale winding for $23.63. The same string in a different package, Ernie Ball group III flats go for $26.98 on their site and only come in long scale. I pick up my strings from them in Milford NH usually after a great breakfast at the riverhouse cafe.

[amptech]

I assumed we were talkin´bout short scale strings, and could not remember seeing any ernie balls where I shop strings (which by the way happens to be juststrings.com) . I wish it was possible to buy strings locally, just to appreciate non-web shops, but flatwounds is a bit too exotic in a small town in Norway... I´d be surprised if they had heard of short scale strings!

[Dave W]

I assumed we were talkin´bout short scale strings, and could not remember seeing any ernie balls where I shop strings (which by the way happens to be juststrings.com) . I wish it was possible to buy strings locally, just to appreciate non-web shops, but flatwounds is a bit too exotic in a small town in Norway... I´d be surprised if they had heard of short scale strings!

Hard to find long scale flatwounds in many retail stores here, much less short scale flats. In the last 20 years, I've only seen short scale flats once in a retail store (they were Chromes), and the clerk told me that's only because they already had a regular customer who bought them.

[Psycho Bass Guy]

I don't remember what I paid for my EB's about five-ten years ago, bit IIRC, it was 19.99, but again, it's been a day or two. I'll shouldn't need to buy strings for the rest of my life. My skin ph doesn't break them down and even though I play extremely hard, I've never had any give me tuning problems with age; they just break. I snapped the low E on my Jazz on the opening note of the second song of our set (or course with no backup bass and certainly no backup strings- I just detuned the other three and carried on). Those were Rotosounds, which I still love for certain basses, including that same Jazz.

It was a problem for me when I had to replace my Ernie Ball Slinky 5's on my G&L L-2500 because I strung it through-body and by the time I bought new strings to replace the ones I swapped for the HORRIBLE factory SIT's, EB had changed the length and the exact same model wouldn't fit my bass through-body anymore; had to bridge-string it. I bought several more sets, puzzled that what I had was different from the what was in stores, thinking I had just found an oddball before contacting EB to find out that they HAD changed the design... ten years before. The change had happened right after I bought my old set. Ernie Ball sent me three MORE sets for free and I hadn't asked for anything but info.

On top of that, I got five or six sets of strings from an eBay auction with my G&L L-5500 and traded a crap Jackson bass for another eight or ten sets around that same time. The sad thing is that none of them are EB flats, which I'm throughly in love with on my Les Paul, but the ones that are on it are holding up fine. However, I'm trying to resume playing out, so that may change. It's good to know about the silk on Chromes versus the EB's though: one more reason for me to stick to the EB version.