A new guitar string developed by a Scottish scientist has struck a chord with leading musicians.
It could revolutionise music by allowing electric instruments to be more balanced in sensitivity and feel than ever before.
Guitarist Mark McGuigan, of mastertheguitar.co.uk who has more than eight million views on YouTube, said: "The new strings are awesome fun and provide fantastic new creative opportunities for your whammy bar."
It has been invented by Dr Jonathan Kemp, head of music technology at the Music Centre at St Andrews University.
Among those to show an interest are guitar master Guthrie Govan, composer David Torn, Paul Masvidal from progressive metal band Cynic and Queen legend Brian May's guitar technician Pete Malandrone.
The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, suggest chord bends can be achieved that have not been possible on standard guitars such as Fender Stratocasters with standard tremolo units or those with the Floyd Rose locking tremolo system.
Dr Kemp, who also lectures in the School of Physics and Astronomy, said: "While string sets have been available before with balanced tensions, those strings have featured different sensitivities, with all strings bending through different pitch intervals when the player performs identical movements.
"The laws of physics prevent equalised feel between different plain steel strings.
"With the new strings the properties are controlled to ensure that four of the strings - the plain G and the overwound D, A and low E strings - on a standard electric guitar bend through the same pitch intervals for identical player control changes, whether that be through conventional pitch bends, dragging the strings through a certain distance along a fret to increase tension, or through use of a tremolo/vibrato arm.
"The clearest demonstration of this is through listening to chords played on these strings during tremolo arm use."
All electric guitar players can benefit from the new strings, not just users of tremolo arms, as the optimised sensitivity means the D string is no longer more difficult to bend than its neighbours.
The low E string also no longer goes more sharp than the rest when played hard. And temperature related tuning problems are reduced.
Dr Kemp added: "The new strings are as cheap to construct as existing designs and all in all this amounts to a breakthrough for electric guitar performance and one that doesn't require any expensive changes to players' existing instruments."
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