La Bella Super Alloy 52 String Review

If you keep up with my blog you’ll note that I’ve tried out some weird strings; everything from bright colored strings, glow in the dark strings, coated strings, strings that wash your car and strings that promise to make you breakfast…ok maybe I made up one or two in there.

The Super Alloy 52 series by La Bella is actually a pretty normal looking, feeling and sounding string. No extreme promises that cannot be met here. The name Super Alloy 52 comes from the construction of the string. It is made from 48% iron and 52% nickel. The iron boosts the string’s magnetic property with hopes of sending a more powerful signal to your pickups, while the nickel content will prevent the string from tarnishing. I checked out two sets; the Blues Medium (11-52 gauge) electric guitar string set and the Standard Light ( 45-105 gauge) 4-string bass string set.

The USA made and manufactured string series offers 5 different sets for electric guitar and 4 different sets for 4 and 5 string electric basses in their 2012 catalog http://www.labellacatalog.com/english/

Blues Mediums. I looked around the room trying to decide which guitar to put these on. Since no one has called the show Hoarders on me yet, I’ve got a few to choose from. After strumming a few I broke the high E on my strat while tuning it up and took it as a sign, this guitar was destined for the new La Bellas. The first thing I noticed was the well organized and numbered string packets inside the tarnish proof package.

Standard Light Bass Strings. There was no magic on which bass to put these on, I recently lucked out and found a rare Hartke XK-4 bass on Craigslist that desperately needed new strings. Same great numbered string packets as the guitar strings, I mindlessly strung up both instruments with ease. The La Bella bass strings had a nice, rigid red wrap at the top to keep the string in place.

Here are my weapons of choice for the soundclips; a mongrel of a US Fender Stratocaster and Hartke XK-4 bass.

Here’s the bass with the neck pickup cranked, the bridge pickup at about halfway straight into a DI into my computer. Pretty fat and clear. Definitely will cut through a mix.

Here’s the Blues Mediums in action. The rhythm is the neck pickup and the weird backwards delayed guitar is the bridge pickup. I had no problem getting the classic bell-like tone of a strat.

Both sets survived the one month test. Still holding tone and sounding great.

Web: labella.com
Street Price: $8 for the guitar strings $32 for the bass strings