What Gauge strings should I use?

Question

I am serching for a extremely hard and HEAVY tone right now and cant seem to find it. Right now I have 0.12 gauge strings on my guitar now and sometimes tune down a whole step. Just looking for suggestions on what strings, Amp settings, tunings, pedals and pretty much anything else that will help me achive this tone im looking for.

Answer 1

Depends how experienced you are but using 12s is not gonna work unless you are Jimi or SRV and you tune a half a step down. Just using a heavy gauge makes no difference if you're gonna tune down that much. Drop D creates a great sound and a lot of hard rock and metal songs are in drop d. The Boss Metal Zone pedal might also work for you and it has a very very wide range of distorted tones. Feel free to message me if you any more questions. Playing a quitar with humbuckers (two single-coil pickup ups side by side) will give a much deeper and middle strong sound that playing a guitar with single-coil pickups. Consider a Gibson Les Paul or Gibson Sg. If you can't afford those try and Epiphone Les Paul which will run about $1000 dollars less than those.

Answer 2

For a Heavy tone use

Randall amps or Line 6(don't recommend Line 6 tho)

Scoop the mid's and put treble and bass to up around 9

ya stick with the .12s and tune down a whole step or a whole step and a half.  If you want you coudl go to 13s for mega heavy

You would want a metal guitar Dean, Jackson's, Ibanez, BC Rich etc.

No Fenders or Gibsons

there not metal guitars

for Pedals I woudl recommend the Boss MT-2

**** loads of ton options with that and it gets wicked heavy

Answer 3

Try learning to play in C#

It's an s**y tuning.

It's heavy without all the tuning bothers and other things of playing in C.

Answer 4

Thicker strings does definitely make a difference, especially when you're tuning down, but if you're looking for a heavy tone, the two most important parts of your signal chain are your pickups and your amp.

12's are definitely thick enough, you don't need to go thicker at this point.

While you can do it other ways, the easiest way to get a beefy tone is to have hot humbuckers in the bridge and a high gain (preferably tube for most people) amp.

Examples of pickups that might do it for you... from DiMarzio: Breed, Evolution, X2N. from Seymour Duncan: Duncan Distortion, Dimebucker, Invaders. I've heard good things about Rockfields and okay things about ... I think they're called Dragonfires or something like that.

Active pickups, like EMGs or Seymour Duncan's Livewires, are also pretty high output.

So ideally you want distortion coming from your amp. Your amp has more headroom than a pedal, and that usually means better tone. That said, if you don't have a great sounding distorted channel, you can try using distortion pedals into your clean one. I have a Metal Zone, and I think it's a pretty frickin' great pedal for metal. It's a little low on the bass side of things, but that isn't always a bad thing.

Brief aside: when playing in a band, bass from a guitar = mud. Too much of it, and you can't hear the bass guitar or even kick drum as well. Since the Metal Zone has less bass than some pedals (Big Muff, for instance) it will work better in a band context than it might sound solo. Sounds change when you play in a band vs playing solo.... people like to cut their mids when playing by themselves, cuz it emphasizes treble and bass. However, in a band situation or when recording, that kills your volume and you end up disappearing.... one of those little tricks that someone who urges you to "just cut your mids" doesn't know....

Okay, anyways, good pedals are the Metal Zone and Metal Muff, but you can do surprising things with many distortion pedals and an EQ pedal.

I could go on and on about how much I love EQ pedals... but I'll cut it short and say that an EQ pedal will help *any* distortion pedal sound better. Eq pedals will also help your amp's tone sound better, too, by correcting little things, a little boost here, a little cut there.

I'm serious when I say that the difference between a good sounding guitar tone and a better sounding guitar tone is usually a bit of EQ in the right place....

Hmmm. I hope I helped a little, I think I might've just rambled on a lot...

Saul