Daddario EXL115-10P

It's a sad day when you realise you can't enjoy any of your four electric guitars. Two need set up and two have horribly rusty strings (my fault, I should change them more often than annually). Enter this cute little blue box. I'm a big Daddario fan, their EXL strings have been on my guitars for years. They stay bright and fresh for ages longer than their rivals and I've only snapped one in the last decade (due to a wonky jazzmaster bridge, not the string's fault). I'm a bit of a chord basher and these strings take a lot of punishment and stay sounding great for far too long. Well done Daddario.

I like this big box, no excess packaging and the string sets are in the standard grey bag, was easy enough to chuck a few spare sets in my gig bag without messing around with endless cardboard packaging.

I have a cheap Strat copy strung with these and it's great for retro distortion tones, Buddy Holly imitations and more. It can do the hyper-mellow jazz thing too. And for slides? Really smooth. Not so much a benders string, but there's lots of interesting things going on with these. Voicing of conventional chord shapes seem to take on a sense of 2 separate registers, with the unwound strings sounding separate from the chunky, woody sound of the flats. This makes soloing a very different experience, as moving strictly vertically on the neck can have a very abrupt effect (which can be used, to make little call and response or pedal-note style ideas on the fly).

I think anyone who uses round wound, regardless of genre, should try a set of flat wound strings at least once and I'm glad I chose this set.