I do play the Alvarez a lot more than the others, but I’m using the same D’Addario EJ16 3D (.012-.053). I tried some Dean Markley signature series and the same exact thing happened. I like 12-fret scale guitars because of the easier bending capabilities, so naturally I’m going to do more bending. I have a new pack of Elixir nanoweb’s in the same gauge that I can try, but at this point, I would rather buy a bunch of individual G-strings and not waste any of my good string packs.

I think I need more guitars so I’m not drilling on just one guitar all the time. It was such a painful process finding a decent acoustic guitar. I tried and set back more guitars than you can shake a stick at. I don’t have access to good stores that carry a decent variety nearby, so I’m left with the online stores that allow easy returns. Sweetwater being the best in taking care of that sort of thing easily. But it’s still painful to go through the long process of waiting only to be disappointed in the end.

That’s going to require a lot of work to find the right one. I’m really picky about guitars and don’t think that paying more is necessarily makes a guitar better. I wasn’t impressed with the one’s I tried at my local music store (over an hour away). I didn’t try the most expensive one they had because I was on a lower budget at the time. Always looking for the gem that doesn’t cost 4K or 5K. I’ll keep looking though.

Just giving an update. I’m not 100% sure about this, but I noticed that various frets were actually scratchy feeling today. My theory is that when the first string degraded, I touched up the frets by polishing out all the scratches. Then next time, for whatever reason, the G-String failed early and I played through the failure causing more damage to the fret surface again. I only noticed this today when I was working on some lead bends up at the 12th fret on the B-String and it had a noticeably scratch feeling while bending. I immediately stopped playing and tested that fret area and all the others I had problems with, and sure enough the frets needed to be touched up again. After the touch up, the bends at the 12th fret were smooth as butter.

It could be soft frets, bad strings, I don’t know the exact root cause exactly, I just know that if the string get’s damaged, you should stop playing that guitar and fix the problem before it gets worse. It’s relatively easy to loosen up the strings enough to get some fret erasers in there to polish out the bad area’s.

It’s just very frustrating having a G-string fail so early like this. I know the original string set that came with the guitar lasted the normal length of time I have come to expect from a string replacement, but everything else I used in my inventory was a bust.

So the conclusion is that even though I polished the frets well after the initial string replacement, the next set of strings had an early failure, and I kept playing on the bad string re-damaging the fret surface, so having more than one go to guitar is the way forward for me. I hate having to stop practicing due to equipment failure. Need more guitars.

Even if you don’t have a winding failure like I did, I suggest loosening your strings and touching up your key bending area’s on the guitar on a regular basis (especially if you have scratchy frets). Having multiple guitars to utilize makes it much easier to continue to play your instrument without interruption.