Strings

Fender OEM strings are awful.
Plain awful...rotten...dead...lifeless.

I had sat with the mandolin and was starting to bond with it, finding my way with it last week.

On one of the forums dedicated to mandolins, there was an ongoing thread about a brand of flatwound strings. Flatwound strings have the wrapped covering flattened rather than just wrapped about the core - which makes for normal roundwound strings.

D'addario makes strings for most stringed instruments. I had used them for years on my guitars. Sometime in the 1990s they went to a "unisex" package in which opening the pack for one string meant opening the container for all of them. No more individual envelopes. While I understand the savings the manufacturer would see, it made the strings far less useful.

Break a high E? Open the whole pack and the remaining five strings begin to age as well. How to store the remaining strings? At a gig this meant a mess. At home I could change all the strings...D'addario's intent all along?

I had sworn off them and reverted to Ernie Ball...strings of my youth.

Back to the mandolin.
A set of regular strings; a mandolin has eight strings, run anywhere from $4 to $10. Flatwounds, on the other hand are closer to $40 a set.
I am too cheap for that. I get two sets of guitar strings for $9!?!
Plus I am new to the instrument and don't want to assume that throwing money will magically make me a better player.
Back to the forum - The Mandolin Cafe
Someone starts a thread about D'addario FW-74s.

As I investigate, I find they are about $10 a set?!
My favorite online string shop, Just Strings, has them. I order a set and wait for them to arrive.
Stringing a new instrument is an adventure.

Mandolins, unlike guitars, have the bottom of the string terminated with a loop that is meant to be put over a cut out tab on the tailpiece.

You loop the end, pull the string up and through the tuner, trying to maintain tension so the loop doesn't fall off the tab and then wind like a guitar.

It took the better part of an hour.
But what a difference? Once I had it strung and tuned, I played a few notes and they rang. The notes didn't decay, but droned on. And clear! Very little bleed between strings. Striking one didn't cause the adjacent string to vibrate as much.
The instrument sound 100% better. Easily.

The pick and the strings that you use, contribute no small part of the overall sound.
I think I have been converted - again.