Stringjoy - The Finest Handmade Guitar Strings now Available in South Africa

Handmade in Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.A.

Stringjoy are the finest hand-made electric, acoustic and bass guitar strings.

Founded in 2014 in Nashville, Tennessee U.S.A. by Scott Marquart, Stringjoy crafts finest guitar and bass strings from all-American high-quality materials, by hand, one at a time. 

After spending some time experimenting with his own guitar strings, combining sets and gauges to make a set that did what he wanted it to do, Scott discovered one major reason that strings had been overlooked as a tone-sculpting tool for so long by many – they just weren’t all that good.

As much as players thought of strings as something cheap they could grab off the rack, to Scott it felt than many manufacturers felt pretty much the same way about them.

The Best Quality handmade acoustic, electric and bass guitar strings

Stringjoy was therefore formed to make the best quality strings accessible to players, at all levels. Although the fledgling firm started small, it didn’t take long for word about the world’s finest guitar strings to spread around and for players to come rushing into the fold.  

Making a Stringjoy string takes time, so Stringjoy’s manufacturing plant was designed to optimise the production process for string performance, not manufacturing speed. The resulting strings are designed and made to sound fuller, perform better and last longer than anything else out there.  

From metal players wanting a tighter bottom end for dropped tunings, to country players who want to achieve the perfect twang, to prog and fusion shredders looking for a perfectly balanced set of strings to optimise their technical efficiency, Stringjoy offers the perfect set for any player.  

From Stringjoys’ modern sounding, high output Nickel Wound Signatures, the long-lasting but still bright and natural sounding Coated Nickel Wound Orbiters and vintage-inspired Pure Nickel Broadways electric guitar strings, to the authentic woodiness of their Phosphor Bronze Naturals, present and punchy 80/20 Bronze Brights and seemingly ever-lasting Coated Phosphor Bronze Foxwoods, as well as their smooth and balanced Nickel Wound Bass Signatures  and piano-like Stainles Steel Roundwound Rangers bass strings, players are bound to find a string to their taste among their wide variety of sets and gauges.    

Why not make guitars, or pedals — y’know, something a little more…fun. Well, the fact that people ask that is exactly why we make strings. See, guitars are fun. Amps are fun. Pedals are tons of fun. But strings? For most folks that’s just something you grab off the rack — an excuse to go to the guitar shop down the street and check out all the gear that’s a little more, well — fun.

Strings are way, way more important than people think. When you play the guitar, you’re really playing the strings. You manipulate the length or tension of each string to create a given pitch.

That pitch resonates through the wood of the guitar or engages the electromagnetic field of your pickups to create the sound you know and love. If you were to write the true signal chain of an electric guitar tone, it would go something like this: Strings > Wood > Pickups > Electronics > Cable > Pedal > Cable > Pedal > Cable > (etc) > Amp > Speaker > Microphone > Cable > Preamp > Outboard Effects > DAW/Speaker System. Notice where that all started? The strings. Yeah — they’re kind of a big deal.

So why have strings been so overlooked for so long? Well for one, there haven’t historically been a ton of options to choose from. Sure, there are tons of brands filling up the wall at your local shop, but within each brand you might have 2-4 wrap materials and 4-5 gauges to choose from.

So sure, you could pick between a dozen different brands’ Nickel-Plated Steel .010s. But what if you wanted .0095s, or a set of .010s with a wound third or a heavier 6th string? Well, that all depended on who you were… See, famous players have been playing customized sets of strings for decades. So if you were a well-known name, just call up your old pal at the string company that sponsored you and he’d whip you up a custom set to your liking. But if you weren’t topping the charts — sorry pal, ain’t happening.

So that’s what got me into all of this. Shoot, we’re halfway through this thing and I still haven’t introduced myself — I’m Scott, I started Stringjoy in 2014. I’m the guy in most of our YouTube videos and ads and stuff, the one with the nerdy glasses.

So I’ve been playing guitar since I was nine and have had the blessing of living a very musical life. I’ve gigged, I’ve recorded, I’ve produced, I’ve run live sound, I’ve worked at a record label, I’ve managed bands, you get the idea. Well long before I started doing many of those things, I started messing with my strings — combining sets and gauges to make a set that did what I wanted it to do. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of trying to make a custom set of strings back in the day, you already know this, but it was a pain. Worth every bit of trouble, but a pain nonetheless.

You had to buy single strings at the store that had been sitting out on a shelf for years, you typically had to mix brands to find the gauges you were after, and there were a lot of gauges that you couldn’t find at all. So initially I started Stringjoy to scratch my own itch — to make building custom sets of strings easy and accessible to players at all levels. Though we were super small at the beginning (I started this whole thing with $500), it didn’t take long for the word to spread about the world’s first guitar string custom shop, and players came rushing into the fold, from metal players wanting a fuller bottom end for dropped tunings, to country players wanting to achieve the perfect twang, to prog and fusion shredders looking for a perfectly balanced set of strings to optimize their technical efficiency.

We were pretty overwhelmed with the demand for the first few years, but we put in long nights and the occasional weekend to make sure we were always shipping orders in a timely manner and communicating with honesty, kindness, and expertise with all of our players.

Over the course of those early years in the string game, I discovered the other reason strings have been overlooked for so long: they just weren’t all that good. Best I could tell, as much as players thought of strings as something cheap they could grab off the rack — a lot of the companies making strings felt pretty much the same way about them.

Sure, in their marketing they’ll use words like “quality” and “premium” ten times in a one-page ad, but if you look at how they make strings they make them as fast as humanly possible, with as little labor as possible, and save every penny they can on the material side. These methods make the strings you’re probably used to — they sound alright when you string them up, require quite a fair bit of work to get everything to intonate and balance out tonally, and they lose a lot of their tone after the first few days. Players just had to accept this as the way it is, and many feel that way up to this day.

Once I saw this for what it was and figured out the reasons why so many strings on the market just didn’t “do it” for me, we pivoted from just being the world’s first true string custom shop (though we’re still that too) to making strings that were just downright better than the other strings on the market, regardless of gauge. When we built out our manufacturing arm here in Nashville, we optimized our process for string performance, not manufacturing speed or labor efficiency.

Making a Stringjoy string takes time. It’s hard work. But our job isn’t to make the cheapest strings — our job is to make the best strings. And if we do that job right, our strings will sound fuller, perform better, and last longer than anything else out there. Now there’s one more thing you should know if you’re considering becoming a Stringjoy player: we change things. Most strings companies have been doing things one way for decades and are afraid if they improved anything they might lose customers.

At Stringjoy, we don’t shy away from innovation, and we don’t wait to put out a new “premium” line to include any improvements we discover. When we find a better way of doing things, we implement it on all of our strings. We’ve made countless improvements to our strings over the years — some you would notice, many you might not — and we have no plans on stopping. I think we make the best strings in the world right now, but I still think our finest strings are ahead of us, and I hope I never feel any differently. If you have any questions about us or our strings, or want some help finding the perfect set for you, give us a shout anytime at support@stringjoy.com

We can’t wait to welcome you into the Stringjoy family!

-SCOTT

Our mission is simple: we want to make the best strings in the world. As you can see, it takes a lot of steps to get there. But to us it’s worth the extra effort, because we know that when you get our strings on your favorite instrument they’ll inspire you to play more, and play more like you. Whether it’s a half-gauge set, a new alloy you’ve never tried, or one of our ever-popular balanced tension string sets, we’re confident there is a set of Stringjoy strings that will take your playing to the next level.

Making Guitar Strings at Stringjoy

First things first, great guitar strings start with great materials, and at Stringjoy we use only the best. Our high-carbon steel core wire is drawn to exacting tolerances (down to the 10,000th of an inch) right here in Tennessee. We source our wrap wire from different drawers depending on the material type and the particular strengths of each source, but the vast majority of our wrap wire is also sourced from within a 150-mile radius of our Nashville shop. Unlike any other company that we know of, we vacuum seal all of our wrap wire spools when they arrive to us and in between production runs to ensure that all of our wire remains as fresh as the day it was drawn. Every spool of wire is inspected for gauge accuracy, strength and finish quality before, and during, the winding process. Even though we only work with drawers that do consistently excellent work, no one is perfect, and when it comes to our strings we leave nothing to chance.

Stringjoy Guitar Strings - Perfection with a Twist.

The first step in the string-making process is ball-ending, where a measured strand of core wire is secured around a polished brass ball-end with a variable series of twists that is dialed-in perfectly for each gauge to offer the greatest stability while minimizing stress on the wire itself. Our ball-end machines were custom-built for us in a machine shop that designed and built many of the guitar-building machines for Gibson’s Kalamazoo factory, but as with all things strings, great strings depend as much on the skill of the operator as they do on the strengths of the machine. Too loose of a twist can cause a string to come undone, too tight of a twist can cause the wire to break, so we’ve perfectly dialed our ball-ending processes to account for each gauge’s tensile strength and torsional durability so we can make a perfect string, every time. If you take your time and ball-end the strings the right way, strings don’t come undone. Other companies have this problem because they run their machinery too fast and don’t keep a watchful eye on it. That’s not our style.

Excellence Takes a Little Longer.

Without a doubt, our winding process is what we’re most proud of. Winding a perfect string is an art. At Stringjoy we wind strings one at a time, through a manual and time-consuming process that heavily relies on the skillset of our expertly trained staff. Depending on the gauge, our strings are made up of as many as 7,700 turns of wire per wind (round wound gauges .064 and under are made with one wind, higher gauges such as you see in bass strings consist of up to four concentric winds). Our winders’ job is to ensure that each of these turns of wire occurs at the exact right place, and at the exact right tension. Doing this right takes time and requires tremendous focus, but it’s what truly makes a string a Stringjoy string, so it’s worth every second. It bears repeating that we are not Luddites about this—we use some of the most sophisticated servo-controlled, dynamic motion-sensing winding equipment in the world today. But even the best machines only do what their operators program them to, and parts tolerances and variances require dynamic adjustments from the machine and its operator to produce a consistent finished product. And beyond that, for certain jobs, our older machines which date back to the 70s (like the one you see in the video there) do an even better job than our new ones, so we use those for what they’re best at as well. Because we’re more obsessive about the winding process than many string companies, Stringjoy strings feature tighter, closer-together winds, which give our strings a smoother feel, increased output due to their higher mass, and added durability since these tight winds keep dirt and oil away from the steel core wire—the part of the string most susceptible to corrosion.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered.

While the most important quality control occurs during the ball-ending and winding process, every Stringjoy string goes through an additional quality inspection before it is coiled. Coiling strings may seem simple, but it is an extremely important part of the process. Our coilers provide our second and final layer of quality control, feeling every string to ensure smoothness and evenness. Once coiled, Stringjoy strings are sealed inside individual nitrogen-flushed barrier pouches. Known as Modified Atmospheric Packaging, this gas flushing process seals the strings in an oxygen free environment, making oxidation impossible. This is how we ensure that Stringjoy strings are always as fresh as the day they were wound. Finally, strings are assembled into finished sets in our trademark aqueous coated box. The Stringjoy employee that performs this final check and assembly signs their name to the inside of the package before sealing it up. Because at Stringjoy we always stand by our product (check out our ironclad guarantee and see what we mean).

Buy your Stringjoy Strings Online in South Africa Today

Wide selection, fast shipping and excellent customer service. Once you've played with Stringjoy's its highly unlikely you'll use any other strings EVER again.