Is a bit of struggle a good thing?

[mbenigni]

That was my go to on Strat scale length for decades. Now I switched to 9.5-44

I used 9's on my "one trick pony" shredders and 10's on everything else before recently discovering 9.5's. They're the bees knees.

 

[mbenigni]

Its nice to do easier bends....and still have that drop tuned tension!

I recently decided to give those La Bella Tony Iommi 9's ("carbon hex core, optimized for C# tuning") a go. Perfectly fine strings but, as expected, the magical "optimization" is pretty much snake oil. String tension is string tension (and you're either Tony Iommi or you're not. And I'm still not convinced he was playing strings quite this light when he was recording in C#.) In any case, it's cool how familiar that slippery wide vibrato sounds, but it's nigh impossible (for me, and for this SG) to stay in tune for long stretches. I'm going back to 10's or 11's on this guitar.

 

[newpedals]

I wanna try these

View attachment 30910

I buy D'addarios. I have always been attracted to Ernie's but they seem to be expensive.