The Varied Uses of Guitar Strings

Cadell stood in his guitar workshop, holding a bouquet of guitar strings in his fist.

Andy had gone to the hospital a few hours before to do rounds and check on Emily. She had texted that Em was doing fine and that they would both see Cadell at two-thirty.

He had texted all the folks on the Killer Valentine tour and his friends from Juilliard to come and watch him get married that afternoon, which meant that he had left his phone upstairs so that he could ignore their frantic texts asking him what the flying fuck and if he had lost his damned mind.

His guitar shop used to be the theoretical third bay of his three-car garage, but it was enclosed and air-conditioned. Guitars of all kinds—acoustic, electric, and some odd hybrids—hung from hooks in the pegboard that covered the walls. Tools, parts, and equipment were put away in drawers or stacked on shelves.

The guitar strings, actually metal wires, bloomed like fireworks in his hand. A ball the size of a BB had been welded on each end to anchor the string in the bridge in the lower bout of the guitar’s body, the “hips” of it.

Some of the strings were golden in color, silk and steel cores wrapped in silk and bronze, phosphor bronze ones, and 80/20 bronze made out of copper and zinc. Others were silvery and pale, like the whippy, garrote-like wires of pure titanium, the white bronze wires made from iron, copper, and nickel, and the Silk and Steels, silver-plated copper wound over a silk and steel core.

To Cadell, they looked like jewelry, precious metals shining in the overhead lights.

He secured the ends of five thin wires in a clamp and began to braid them in a complicated, Celtic knot-type pattern.