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Excellent stuff! Thanks for this, Brian. Dick is wrong on one
thing, though: Ernie Ball didn't start selling strings until later
in the sixties - they were not available during the surf heyday.
One more thing I thought of: the Atlantics in Australia were
definitely using roundwounds in '63 (and maybe earlier), as you can
hear them doing (intentional) pick scrapes on several songs. And if
roundwounds were available in AUSTRALIA in '63, I'm sure they were
widely available in the US, as well. So, it appears that it was
simply the personal choice of the guitarists which strings they
would use, as it is today.
BTW, Nokie Edwards can also be heard doing pick scrapes with the
Ventures in '64-'65, so he also had roundwounds.
Ivan
--- In , "Brian Neal" <bgneal@g...>
wrote:
> Just for fun I emailed Dick Dale and Paul Johnson and asked them
> about the whole round wound vs flat wound thing back in the 60's.
>
> Dick told me that they had both flats and rounds available in the
> 60's. He tried the flats because he preferred their smooth feel
> because his string gauge was 16p 18p 20p 39w 49w 60w. But he did
not
> like how they sounded and went right back to the round wounds.
>
> Dick said that Fender made their own round wounds back then and he
> preferred those over Ernie Ball round wounds (at the time).
> Currently he uses Dean Markley blue steels.
>
> Paul told me that he used flats back then, but he doesn't remember
> for sure what Eddie used. He did confirm that more people used
flats
> back then than rounds, but made it seem like rounds were
available.
> He also said lighter gauge strings did not come until later.
>
> It's kind of cool getting email from two surf guitar legends
within
> 2 minutes of each other...!
>
> BN
