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Now, strings have generally been one of the aspects of guitar playing that I really don’t give much time to, if it ain’t broke etc. Of course they need to be regularly replaced to avoid the tinfoil chewingly bad experience of rusty strings. A sales rep once told me a story about a guitarist he knew, who’d feverishly recommended one set of strings and utterly shunned another. He looked at me with a cheeky smile and said ‘I didn’t have the heart to tell him, but they were both store branded sets and came off the same production line.’ so tastes in strings can be down some kind of placebo effect with packaging and whatnot, but if you do buy a Chinese made non-brand set for two pounds, chances are they’ll be crap.

However, when something truly quite different comes along like the Elixir Nanoweb strings, it’s probably worth having a look.

The Elixir Nanowebs are simply, very good quality strings wrapped in high tech stuff. Created by Gore, a company that makes all sorts of products, the most notable and famous of which being heavy duty outdoor clothing.

First stringing up the guitar, you really can’t help but sit there for ages trying to see the mega thin coating. The coating is so thin it’s almost like the string has a soft aura, but no visible layer. It’s only when you kink the string that the coating becomes visible and it is damn thin.

First impressions after tuning up are that these are unusually crisp sounding and have a slick almost waxy feel to them. The coating, rather than dulling the sound actually brightens it!

This is all well and good, however the main selling point of these strings is lastability and lasted they did. The strings amazingly kept the ‘just restrung’ feeling for ages, far longer than a standard set. By the time that would have made a normal set deteriorate so much that I would have considered a restring, these were still going strong and had dulled very little. The first thing to dull were the top strings, with the wound strings hanging on to life a great deal longer. I finally conceded and replaced the set after breaking the bottom E in some kind of drunken sing along. Which was heart breaking as they still sounded and felt fine!

So to sum up, these are great sounding strings that just keep going and going. But beware, they will last for two to three times longer as the manufacturer states, but just because they’ve got space age stuff on them doesn’t mean they won’t snap after eight pints and a heavy handed folk/rock camp fire medley.