Phil Collen has looked back on his surprising switch to heavy guitar strings – and revealed it was Gary Moore who set him on his path to conversion.
The Def Leppard guitarist is a proponent of fretboard pyro. He plays a high-performance signature twist on the Jackson Dinky, and those US Custom Shop builds have all the luxuries to make them easy to play.
Collen can play a ripping solo with the best of them. But he likes a guitar that fights back. The production models of his PC-1 signature guitar – most recently reimagined as the pre-relic’d PC1-E Mexican-built Pro Series model – have skinny necks as per the brand’s house style, and yet Collen will get his tech to find him baseball bat necks.
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Those signatures also ship with 9-gauge strings, but Collen puts 13s on his own. In the new issue of Guitarist, Collen explains exactly why he likes heavy electric guitar strings – and it all goes back to his early touring adventures with Def Leppard, when one of his all-time heroes was opening the show for them.
“Back on Def Leppard’s Pyromania tour, Gary Moore was opening for us,” recalls Collen. “I went into his dressing room and saw the famous Peter Green Les Paul. I said, ‘Is that the Peter Green Les Paul?’ and Gary said, ‘Yeah, do you want to play it?’ So he picked up another guitar and we jammed for about an hour.”
This was a real pinch-me moment for Collen. It was also life changing. Greeny was working its magic on him, and he liked how Moore had set the guitar up.
“He had 10s on the Les Paul – I was used to playing nines, but I loved the feel,” says Collen.
Collen duly started using 10s. But that’s the funny thing about the guitar; you start going down the rabbit-hole, and you keep going deeper. The heavier gauge strings allowed him to express himself better.
“I use 13s to 54s now,” says Collen. “After a while I moved up to 11s, then 12s and eventually 13s. I’ve probably been using 13s for about 10 years now. Your fingers get stronger, and I like being able to really lay into the guitar.”
Collen isn’t the first high-profile player to use heavy strings on his electric guitar. Stevie Ray Vaughan was the most-famous proponent of strings like power cables.
Malcolm Young liked a set of 12s, and the Edge and Joe Bonamassa string up with a set of 11s, which is still pretty heavy – and it feels like a bigger step up from nines to 10s. Jim Adkins of Jimmy Eat World uses 13s, as does Bonamassa’s rhythm guitarist and co-producer Josh Smith.
And if you think these guys are nuts, then just consider Dick Dale. He used a set of 16s.
You can read this Phil Collen interview in full in the latest issue of Guitarist – better still, save and subscribe.
