Rev. Willy's Mexican Lottery Strings .007-.038

[bonzoboy]

Yesterday afternoon while I had the house to myself I decided to break out with my Jimmie Vaughn Strat and give the new Rev. Willy's a good workout.I was surprised by how quickly my hands adapted to the feel of them for lead work,they are just great.Needless to say I tried some Hendrix songs as I get pretty brutal on the strings playing his songs.The bends in the intro to "Voodoo Child(slight return)" took little more effort than just thinking about them and I was able to nail parts of the leads that I haven't been able to do for almost 2 years.The strings are extremely malleable yet return to the right pitch even after a 3 step bend or even more.They are extremely clean and bright sounding and even though Jimi used a 1959 Marshall for his first album I was able to nail the tone of "Are You Experienced" with my AC-15 after a good bit of twiddling and fiddling.The Strat sound in that song is just the sound that every Strat player wants to achieve and it's no problem with these strings.My hands still got tired when playing songs with strictly chords only but the worst part was confined to the fleshy part of my palm at the base of my left thumb,if it wasn't for that I could tolerate playing much longer.They may be way too light for a lot of people but I would imagine that the heavier sets are made up of the same alloys and should pretty well be the same tonal signature.

 

After I put these on I had to lower the string height and adjust the intonation,and today I am aiming to get the vibrato mechanism set up so that the strings return to the same pitch even after an agressive whammy workout such as "The Star Spangled Banner","Machine Gun" or "I Don't Live Today".This will be a bit of a delicat chore as I prefer to have my vibratos decked so going back to correct pitch every time is hard to achieve because the thinner the strings the more touchy the whole mechanism becomes.Anyway after a bit of trial and error and no doubt a profusion of expletives,I should get it done.