Rick 360/12 Roundwound strings?

[dirk_benedict]

I have a newish Rick 360/12 w/ Toasters on it. It came to me with flatwound strings. Flats give it that classic Rick sound, but they are a little beastly to play (on a guitar that is, by itself, pretty difficult to get used to). Curious if anyone here has put roundwounds on one and/or if this will really make much of a difference, feel-wise on the axe? Rick traditionalists seem to have some very strong opinions on this topic.

As a sidenote- I've been playing guitar 15 years, I generally play 11 gauge strings and use action a little on the high side, so I don't think this is simply a matter of a weak left hand (could very well be though).

 

[claudel]

I no longer have my 360/12, I didn't bond with the pencil neck.

I didn't care for the Pyramid flatwounds myself either, so I wound up using Rickenbacker round wounds.

Personally, I liked the feel and the tone of those much better than the Pyramids but they didn't do much for the skinny neck.

 

[gtrnstuff]

I always used D'addario rounds on my Ric 12. Great sound. But I'm with claudel, I couldn't deal with the narrow neck. My fingers were always muffling the adjacent open strings that I wanted to ring.

 

[zombiwoof]

I've always found it unbelievable that Ric doesn't offer a wider neck option on their twelve string models, the only ones that have it are some sig models like the Petty and the McGuinn limited editions. They seem to be a very conservative company, McGuinn said he had a hard time getting them to even put the compressor in his model. It seems that since they used to use the narrow neck as a selling point in their twelve string guitars (same width as the 6 string guitars!), they don't want to give us one with a wider neck. I think they are missing the boat here, as many players just can't hack the narrow string spacing. I think my brother told me he got one production twelve with a wider neck, but they are very hard to find.

I also think Pyramid should put out a twelve string set of their round core pure nickel strings (Classics), that would be awesome IMO. I've thought of making my own custom set with a 6 string set and extra strings, the only extra wound string I think that would be needed would be the second string for the low "E" position, the rest would be plain strings. I don't think any company makes a pure nickel 12 string set that I know of. I think the recent Rickenbacker strings are actually made by D'Addario or someone else, McGuinn used to use those before he got into the Pyramid flats.

Al