Daddario EXL110

To be perfectly honest, I haven't tried out every brand of guitar strings out there, and in my 11 years of playing, D'Addario EXLs have always been a mainstay for me, mainly because they are so cheap and readily available. Even when do I try out some other brand, at the end of the day I see myself coming back to D'Addario EXLs, because they just work. I've used the EXL110 set extensively on my old Dean Vendetta XMT, and I also use them on my newer Dean ML 79 F, mostly tuned at Standard C# plus 30 cents (yes, I'm weird like that), sometimes lower or higher.

I've seldom had issues with intonation from these strings. That's usually the fault of your guitar setup, specifically the position of the saddles, the string height and the neck's contour. Once the strings are stretched out, they keep their tuning fairly well - barring changes in temperature and humidity, of course. But I'd wager that, even if you forget to stretch your strings while restringing, they'd still be quite stable after a few bends here and there. Sometimes I don't even let them sit after restringing, and they're still good to go.

Now, I love the sound of fresh strings, and I tend to change strings once they start sounding somewhat dull. On the D'Addario EXLs, that's usually about a month, month and a half, but I've also gone with the same set for longer. In my experience, the wound strings can stay pretty fresh (or, as some like to say, keep their "zinginess") for approximately two, sometimes even three weeks of moderate playing, depending on the air humidity and how much I sweat.

I've found these strings to be quite durable. The only issues I've had thus far with string breakage are on the old Dean Vendetta, where the highest string would sometimes break at the tuning post after bending a bit too much (the age and quality of the guitar are to blame; I've since kept one or two more turns around that tuning post), and on my Dean ML 79 F where after three to five weeks, they have somewhat of a tendency to break at the saddles after ridiculous pull-ups with the Floyd Rose. But on a Floyd Rose equipped guitar, it's a good idea to keep more of the string around the tuning posts anyways, so that you can just feed the strings back into the saddle and retune without much hassle.

I've also tried the D'Addario EXL110BT in the past, which is the balanced tension version of the EXL110, but that would probably also call for a separate review. I will however mention that, at least on the Dean Vendetta, it has indeed given a much more balanced feel when doing bends with the plain strings; on the flipside, the wound strings do feel a tad slinkier.

Last but not least, the EXLs just feel right on my fingers. Coarse enough to get a good grip on, yet they still seem to allow the fingers to glide with ease.

I realize that string brand preference differs from person to person. But if you're looking for good round wounds, at least in my experience I can wholeheartedly recommend the EXL110s - or, for that matter, any of the D'Addario EXL sets, depending on your scale length, tuning or tension preferences.

You know what you get with this one. D'Addario has been around a long, long time and is a well known label of guitar strings. The color coding... well, nuff said about that one. If for some reason you can't determine which string is the thinnest, the color coding will help you. In a Gibson style tailpeace they'll also look sort of entertaining with the different colors.

Some people may complain that they feel plasticy and I can sort of see what they mean by that assessment. On the other hand I have never been bothered by it. I suppose that has everything to do with their advertising point that, they will not rust that easily.

There is, however, one gripe I might have about the D'Addario strings. It is that, all the strings are packed in that plastic bag, meaning that, if for some reason you need to swap just one string, for example at a show, the rest of the strings will be just lying around sort of unprotected.

Of course, in this day and age we would have a whole discussion about having less packing material this way. However, there is a case for the individual string envelopes here.