Guitar Strings for the Total Dummy

Lori used a picture of nylon strings...

For several years, our staffers had ignored the website WiseGeek.com as a repository for internet dumbassery. Why? perhaps because they, like many, were fooled by the name. It could also be that the level of semi-plagiarism – skillful rewording of authoritative text – at the site was much higher than in the DMS¹ family of websites. There also seem to be far fewer candidate freelancers at WG meaning, perhaps, a bit more rigorous screening of their "qualifications." Nonetheless, there are plenty of posts that meet all our criteria for DotD; we just have to look a little harder. Look, we did, and we caught not-so-wise geek Lori Kilchermann bullshitting us with "How Do I Choose the Best Acoustic Guitar Strings?" Oops...

Kilchermann, in the best tradition of freelancers who lack even a basic grounding in their topic (c.f. Mary Roach), checked with an expert. Unfortunately, neither Lori nor her editor (Lauren Fritsky) knew enough about acoustic guitars to avoid a crucial mistake. Kilchermann opened by informing her readers that

"Acoustic guitar strings are available in several sizes and material compositions, with each providing a very unique character and sound. Other factors that will aid in your selection of the best acoustic guitar strings are your playing ability, your body type and your price point. While the sound made by any guitar is individual and typically independent from all other guitars, some similarities will exist in string choices and can be replicated from set to set, with each producing the requested performance."

The utter banality of such a claim notwithstanding, Lori's sort of on the right track. It's what she does after this that exposes her ignorance. Here are some of the key statements in Lori's post:

• "The first step, however, in finding the best strings is to have the guitar properly set up by an experienced guitar technician." Surely she jests...
• "You may wish to choose a string high in phosphorous and bronze, as this is typically a brighter-sounding string."
• "...an 85/15 string will sound much brighter than a 75/25 string, and so on..."
• "It is also possible to purchase titanium strings to prevent rust..."

While none of these statements is demonstrably false (given that she merely did a very good job of rewording text written by someone who knows a guitar string from a hole in the ground), Kilchermann definitely blew it from the get-go. We'll let someone from "Guitar World" show us where Lori screwed up:

"This might seem obvious, but first and foremost, take a look at guitar and determine which type of strings you need. Acoustic steel, electric, classical nylon [bolding ours]? Most of the time these strings are not interchangeable."

It's apparently not obvious to Kilchermann, whose ignorance of acoustic guitars led her to completely ignore classical guitars and other styles (flamenco, folk) that use nylon strings. We certainly hope no one new to acoustic guitars gets the impression from our Dumbass of the Day that it's OK to string their git-fiddle with steel strings instead of nylon: that way lies a busted guitar!

For what it's worth, our research staffer found it hilarious that the three images used by Kilchermann and WiseGeek included not one but two different photos of an acoustic guitar strung with nylon strings, one of which is reproduced above. Dumbasses, anyone?

¹ DMS is/was Demand Media Studios, now known as Leaf Group. We like to keep calling them DMS, though, because of the aphorism "You can't spell 'dumbass' without 'DMS.""

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