How Strings Are Made (With Ernie Ball)
We all know guitar string extraordinaire Ernie Ball. His family has been manufacturing guitar strings for the better part of a century, making Ernie a legend in the guitar industry, and for good reason: his company makes the best guitar strings out there. Period. This week, Josh sat down with grandson Brian Ball to find out just how guitar strings are made.
There’s more to it than you may think, but we had to unravel this mystery, if for no other reason than because (to quote fellow string-maker Rudolf Smuntz) "a world without string is chaos."
Without further ado, let’s dive into that interview!
JOSH
So what do you know about the history of guitar strings?
BRIAN
The history of guitar strings pre-1962, when my grandpa created slinkies? (Josh nods) I'm familiar obviously with gut-strings and the evolution into stainless steel strings [and] acoustic strings. So I would say I'm generally aware of the history, but maybe not the encyclopedia of string history like you are with [guitar] pedals.
JOSH
So, [guitar] strings predate the guitar. The first strings, we see them about 500 BC in Egypt. This is interesting, because [it means that] my current job evolves from 1962, the Maestro Fuzz-Tone. Yours evolves from 500 BC Egypt. You're tied into this crazy long narrative. You can see strings were a common item in markets in the 1600s. Someone [in America] started making them and they stopped importing them, probably. Wound strings appear in the seventeenth century, and they’re in America by the nineteenth [century] the Industrial Revolution because of steel. Ernie Ball, your grandpa fits into that fairly quickly by the fifties/sixties, 1961-62. Your grandpa didn't just wake up and make strings. How [did] it start for him? What is the Ernie Ball origin story?
BRIAN
Coming out of the Korean War, my grandpa…he didn't want to sell boats, right? He was on the coast of California. Didn't want to sell boats, didn’t want to go into selling cars, had no passion for insurance. All he [was interested in] was guitar…He transitioned that love for guitars into, well, “If I love it this much, I'm sure everybody else is going to love it.” So he created a retail store that only sells guitars, which in the mid-1950s is borderline crazy. If you're not selling trumpets and saxophones and drums…how do you expect you're going to make it as a retailer?
JOSH
So Ernie is a great entrepreneurial example. In 1962, what was the string market like? Who were the players?
BRIAN
The guitar string really wasn't a market yet [in 1962]. Generally, in the time that Slinkys were created, you couldn't find thin enough guitar strings that matched the dexterity and strength to bend guitar strings and to really express yourself with a solo or a melody line. You could kind of do it, but you really couldn't get it in the way that you were hearing your idols do it. A lot of musicians at the time were playing 12 gauge and up, and that was kind of your standard. Some of the strings that we still offer today, a 12-54 and a 13-56, are similar gauges that we offer for Earthwood. Those were gauges that were fairly common back then for electric guitar strings. It wasn't until Slinkys that 9-42 and 10-46 and later on 11-48 and these other gauge combinations were created and made it easier to play.
[Ernie] saw an opportunity. He obviously was endorsed by Leo. He was a dealer of Leo Fender guitars. He went to Leo and presented the opportunity. “I think this is something kind of cool.” Leo was busy for obvious reasons, creating the P-Bass, the Strat, the Tele, all these instruments that are still widely recognized as some of the best in the world. [Leo said,] “Well, Ernie, if you think this is that great of an idea, why don't you go do it?” So he gathered my dad Sterling, my uncles, my aunt– those were the kids that would go in his retail shop and take banjo strings out of banjo packs, skinny strings, the unwound plains, and package them into different sets that were called Ernie Ball Rock n Roll Guitar Strings.
He had famous musicians coming into the shop, wanting to not just look at guitars, but [to] have their setup dialed in. He didn't put on [the strings] they wanted. He put on these Ernie Ball Rock n Roll strings. Guitar strings became the epicenter of his store.
JOSH
Ernie Ball strings have a look. I started playing them because they were more colorful and that was fun to me. That's honestly why I picked up Slinkys when I was a teenager [and] kept playing them. How did that happen with those colors? The bright packaging?
BRIAN
I can remember seeing neon pink and neon green from such an early age. The origins of those colors…it's interesting, looking back on what happened. In the beta test [asking] do we like a black pack of guitar strings or fluorescent, it was a sixth grade classroom in Newport Beach in the early 1960s. Ernie had no interest in creating the guitar string pack with a stock font. There was an artist named Rolly Crump, who was a partner of my grandfather's in an art agency. Rolly Fargo Crump was the artist who made “It’s a Small World” for Walt Disney. If you ever go on that ride, you'll see these unique artistic things that are very similar to Ernie Ball string packs. The eagle, the fonts, those marks were created out of a love and passion for art in general. There was an element that we wanted to be the first thing that you saw when you walk into a guitar shop. Pre-Slinkys, there wasn't a wall of guitar strings, so giving retailers and giving people something unique to merchandise was another aspect of creating these fluorescent colors.
JOSH
How does this process evolve and how do they make the wound element, the plain element? How does this all go into play with Ernie Ball having more gauges [and a] different variety?
BRIAN
The foundation of a guitar string and how it's made hasn't changed that much from the 1960s. A wound guitar string starts with a high-carbon, plain-steel core wire. Back in the sixties, we used machines that were essentially like a lathe. You wrap the wrap wire around a lathe at a specific tension, which enables that wrap wire to maintain and lock on the core wire on the plain strings or an unwound guitar string. Those have remained pretty consistent. It's generally a tin-plated high carbon steel. A plain guitar string is manufactured differently than a wound string only in the context that it doesn't have to go on a spindle or a lathe. There's no tension. There's no wrap wire that goes across the string, but the process of attaching a ball end and securing a ball end in a way that creates great intonation, great tuning stability, it's going to be reliable in its tensile strength, it's going to be ductile enough that you can bend it… These are all components that go into making a great plain guitar string. Certain parameters that allow us to be more consistent and reliable have evolved with the introduction of robotics, the introduction of servos, and controls, and all [the technology] that really wasn't around back then.
JOSH
The only [guitar] string available in my huge hometown of Russellville, Alabama were Earthwoods. So how are those different?
BRIAN
The construction, the tension, the recipes, and how we wind and create an acoustic guitar string are different. In the acoustic guitar, for Earthwoods, we primarily use 80-20 brass for wrap wire, and we also use phosphor bronze for guitar strings. The phosphor generally gives you more of a warmer tone, a different timber than the brightness and clarity you get from an 80-20 string.
JOSH
Electric guitar strings are half plain [strings.] Acoustic [is] a little less than half plain [strings]. Bass [strings are] all wound and they're huge…What's the process like?
BRIAN
[In] bass string construction, there are no plain strings. As you make a G string, it's traditionally a single wrap string. The D and the A string on a bass guitar are primarily double wrapped guitar strings. Then as you graduate into the E string and even a B on a five-string bass, those usually are pretty big cables and you've got to triple wrap that string. It takes a lot of time, and a lot of material. Different tensions and how the string lays on each different winding is all crucial to making a [bass] string that's going to provide all the things that you want.
JOSH
The reinforcement process. How new is that in string evolution?
BRIAN
RPS strings, or reinforced plain strings, were the first patent we got in manufacturing strings. It was in 1984, and you had guys like Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Morrison and Eddie Van Halen playing guitar in a way that was so fast, and so technical. The way they would bend and dive bomb and the abuse that they would put on plain steel strings was, in a lot of ways, pretty ferocious …So that era of rock ‘n’ roll guitar presented a new opportunity. We reinforced the lock twist underneath the ball end with a brass wrapping, and it really created a very stable and solid guitar string construction for plain strings.
JOSH
Let's talk about your tech for in-the-wild strings on guitar. How in the world can a guitar string stay on the guitar and not just go downhill really quickly?
BRIAN
A lot of companies have created new advancements for protecting the long-term health and life of the string. We've done the same thing, but we do it differently. The way Ernie Ball treats guitar strings is done [by a] process called vapor deposition technology. Vapor deposition technology essentially treats the strings under a vacuum, and we are the only people that treat strings this way. We believe it's a really effective method for protecting guitar strings long-term.
JOSH
What's the expiration date on a pack of Slinkys? How long do we have?
BRIAN
I'd say [for a] minimum of two or three years they're going to be fine. How we packaged strings for years was using fluorescent paper with vinyl sleeves. Up until 2008, we didn't have a way of ensuring that if our strings had been in a road case for a year and a half, [they were still] going to be as fresh as the day they were made. So we pushed to create element shield packaging, which is still the same authentic colors, still the same marks and artwork, but we wanted to create a seal on it that was the equivalent of creating a food perishable package for guitar strings. It [wouldn't] matter if you're in a humid environment or they're left in a road case. Sealing this pack and really treating our packaging was crucial to ensuring the strings were as reliable as they could be. The element shield was a pretty big moment for us. We still continue to package strings like that today.
JOSH
Tell me about cobalt technology.
BRIAN
We wanted to create something that had more output, but not just more output for the sake of overdriving an amp, but [to produce] a different frequency response. The way that we heat treated cobalt and iron together gave us a very unique voice for guitar. We all played it and it was very qualitative in that we all thought it was louder, it sounded different, [and] in some ways it was better. We needed to verify that the strings were different from Slinkys and were different from something else. An acoustics lab internally really [showed] us that there was a different frequency response, there was more output, there was a different level of decay …There really was a unique voice that we were creating. [It] paved a way for us to get a patent on something that was truly unique and still to this day is another option that a lot of our fans play.
JOSH
Tell me about the unbreakable string, the Ernie Ball Paradigm.
BRIAN
Paradigm Slinkys were something that we were working on for a really long time, because if you're going to create something that's really strong, you still have to be able to bend it…We knew that guitar strings can still break, but as we got into launching the strings, part of our beta was to challenge our marquis artists, to challenge Kirk Hammett, “Can you break them?”… They're like, “I can't do it.”...It became a thing that we thought, “Okay, crazy enough, let's try to launch and market the first unbreakable guitar strings.”
JOSH
In this industry from my perspective (and I know it's [the same] for you), the make or break is quality control. You can make good strings or good pedals, [but] they have to work. They have to not have issues. So tell me about that with Ernie Ball.
BRIAN
We're really aggressively diligent to test before, during, and after the process of manufacturing a string. We inspect every spool of wire when it comes in. As it's being made on the floor, we've got people checking with their hands. Are there spots? Are there bumps in the string? Are they made right?... We make sure we know exactly if there ever was a problem which machine it was made on. We take a pack of strings every hour off every conveyor. We submerge it in a water tank to test the integrity of the seal. This process of testing and ensuring that every pack of strings we make is something that someone's going to be proud that they purchased is really, really important to us.
JOSH
Tell me about the Ernie Ball [guitar] strap. How did this happen? How many have you made? What's the guess? I have a hundred of them. I still have a couple of originals from when I was a teenager. It's almost like seeing a pair of Vans or something. There's an iconic status to that strap. Tell me about that.
BRIAN
The Ernie Ball Polypro Strap happened a little bit by accident, to be perfectly honest. Because strings on a guitar aren't super visual…[Ernie] thought there could be another way to [display] your preference [like a guitar strap]...But as I think through the design of the Polypro straps, he was really, really, really picky with the leather ends we chose. He was really picky with the gold foil, the color of it, how it was stamped, how much pressure it’s stamped with. The length of the strap was really important to him. At the time, the adjustability of a strap, there were very few straps that you can adjust up to 72 inches, right? So I think the idea of creating a reliable guitar strap stemmed from his passion for creating a reliable guitar string.
JOSH
Ernie Ball is a family business. How do you feel about that, when you look at the guitar industry, knowing you're one of the only remaining family businesses?
BRIAN
From my vantage point, I had the luxury of learning from my Dad. I had the luxury of watching my Grandpa in action, live, and there's no amount of lessons, schooling, anything that could replace the things that I got to learn from my dad and my grandpa. Family business is a dying breed in some ways, you know. I'm really proud we’re [a] multi-generational [company]... Hopefully we're going to make it to ten generations. I wish there were more of them, because I believe that family businesses in a lot of ways are the heartbeat of the music industry. Fender started off as one. We've got great competitors that are family businesses. Gibson was a family business at one point. I'm really proud that we're still here and rolling.
JOSH
You guys have done amazing stuff. You're carrying this legacy, innovating, inventing new tech. If he could walk around this crazy production floor here, what do you think [Ernie] would say?
BRIAN
I think about that often. And my first inclination is to hope he'd be really proud of what we're doing and what we're trying to do, to carry on the things that were important to him. We are a business, and obviously we want to grow the company. I want to build the legacy, but it's really not about that. There's something bigger that we're doing...You can pick up the instrument, you can pick up the guitar and through a pedal or a pack of strings or an amp or the combination of [them], [you can] create any specific emotion that you want to feel. The fact that our products are tied into that is the greatest gift…We're creating something that's so dynamic and so fun. Music is, to me, the most powerful form of self-expression in the world.