6:52 a.m. - 2024-02-07
silver string

I was up early when a guitar string broke on the acoustic...startlingly, and of its own accord. Tired of this life apparently. Tired of this room...tired of playing the same damn songs over and over. Just couldn't take it anymore. It was also very, very old.

As are the brothers who survive it.

I don't mean the ageless nylon-plastic “high” strings, they'll no-doubt outlive me and retire from music one day...maybe to start a better life as part of a floating garbage-collective visible from space. I'm talking about the bronze-wound “bottom” strings; these are obviously old. Old and dull. The color of rusty mining equipment abandoned outside a ghost town, that's how I like my strings. I want 'em to sound off begrudgingly before returning to weary silence...I want to hear a listless-but-predictably-intonated roll call and little else. Perhaps it's because I've always played on “dead” strings, and finger-pick accordingly? Regardless, one of my veteran squad had just ended it all, and I needed a replacement.

Delight at finding a new pack of strings in the guitar-case turned to confusion when I pulled one out: this was silver-wound, not bronze. Had I bought these w/out reading the label?

“Well...how bad could it be?” I thought as I strung the thing up.

“Worse than you could have imagined” I would answer myself, frowning as I fingered some chords while tuning.

“Even worse than that...” I'd later amend.

If “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”, then describing “tone”, specifically, should be an equally abstract endeavor. But musicians do it enough that their palette of timbres has a more-or-less standardized nomenclature, and I've spent enough time around (real) musicians to have picked up the lingo. Warm, round, woody...airy, brassy or crisp; there's tube-tone vs solid-state, there's fuzz and crunch and twang. Some of my favorite terms use color to describe a sound; we all recognize a “blue note” no? (That flattened intonation that imparts a minor feel to an otherwise-major key.) And the “brown sound” is an apt description of the overdriven guitar sludge favored by those heaviest of metal-ers. Jazz musicians, unsurprisingly, have a lingo as esoteric and vivid as the music they produce, and my favorite “synesthestatic”¹ term hails from their world. “Orange” means “unexpectedly dissonant”...think Coltrane, think Zappa. It's the opposite of “vanilla” essentially, and I rank it up there w/life-vests and traffic cones as a perfect use for our least-appreciated tertiary color.

My own terminology (like my skill level) is pretty basic; things either sound “fine” or they “suck ass”, and the new string fell squarely in the latter camp. It was impossibly bright for starters. Even visually--it shone like a gaudy racing stripe down the neck, and was destined to stay that way. Because, unlike it's bronze-wound neighbors, it would never patina. Too-bright, too, was its tone. Compared to the mellow authority of the other strings it sounded like a child's toy, tinny and frivolous...yet obnoxiously loud at the same time. It was also hyper-resonant and rang roughshod over any competing notes; an annoyance exacerbated by the fact that, even after hours of stretching and playing, the damn thing refused to hold tune.

So yeah; a shiny, too-loud, center-of-attention that was never quite in tune...it seems that the drunk girl from karaoke night had joined the band.

I sighed, made a mental note to pick up the right strings, and headed for the lumberyard. Or as far as the driveway would take me...for the van had a flat. A minor issue usually, I'd just pull the tire, throw it in the truck-bed and get it patched in town. Only the truck wouldn't start. Dead battery...something I've had on my “next paycheck” purchase list. I sighed again and made another mental note: this would be the year I sucked it up and got a physical after my birthday; blood, colonoscopy, the works.

Because entropy, an' shit.

~ ~ ~

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