Best string gauges for guitars with magnetic sustainer devices

Question

After decades of being a Tele guy, I decided to make a change away from hard-tail. I went all the way to an Ed O'Brien Strat with a Fernandes Sustainer system.

I'm still on the first set of strings, which the Internet tells me should be 9s, and I'm finding that some strings are not being "caught" by the magnets to the extent I would like. Specifically, the B-string response is weaker than I would like.

When in sustain mode, it pulls from the Seymour Duncan JB bridge pickup and sends signal to the Sustainer in the neck pickup. There is a switch that allows the choice between reinforcing the current note and an octave up, or a mix I don't understand yet.

It's the low strings that I find work the best, so I'm thinking that thicker strings, maybe 10s or more, might work better, getting more metal for the magnets to grab. In the other hand, I could imagine thinner strings like 9s and 8s having less mass, providing less inertia for the mechanism to override.

Between the Sustainer and the E-Bow, driving strings with magnets is a decades-old thing so these questions must be answered, but they never have been a major thing, so the answers are not common knowledge. Hopefully, someone here knows.

Answer 1

https://www.fmicassets.com/Damroot/Original/10001/Fender_Ed_O_Brien_Stratocaster_0140192305_SM_REV_A_11-08-2017.pdf

The manual for you guitar (link above) gives recommendations on adjusting pickup height and sustainer potmeters (in the sustainer cavity at the back of your guitar). I think it would be wise to follow them, and experiment a bit to find the settings which work best for you.

When the sustainer is active, the bridge and middle pickups are not active. The sustainer works only through the neck pickup. In the manual, there is a recommended height for the neck pickup, and you are advised to adjust the middle and bridge pickups to match your neck pickup after it has been adjusted properly.

Like you may have noticed, this guitar, like all electric guitars, resonate and sustain more when played through an amplifier at concert or rehersal volume with proper gain settings. This will also affect a guitar with a sustainer, and provide it with more acoustic resonance to work with.

My advice for you is to read the manual carefully and do some trialing and erroring until you find your favorite settings. As long as .09 strings are provided with the guitar, I doubt thicker or thinner strings will be a huge improvement. However, like on all guitars, it's important that the strings vibrate freely, that they are clean and that there is nothing - like dirt or lint - dampening them, especially at the points where they're in contact with the bridge and the nut.

Answer 2

I've been using an E-bow for several years now. As in your case the higher strings do not respond very well.

Here a list of what you could try:

Using a sustainer you need sometimes to use a strong left hand finger vibrato to get it rolling because the magnetic pickup of the sustainer needs something to be fed with to create the feedback cycle. Working on that technique will benefit your creativity.

Old strings most definitely create problems.

Another improvement is to get the sustainer coil nearer to the strings which will make the fed back signal stronger. This could also be done within limits by lowering slightly your b-string action on your Strat.

On the other hand, if the bridge pickup feeds the sustainer, try raising slightly the screws of the bridge pickup for the b-string (I suppose it is the original slim humbucker). Be careful, you might mess up the volume balance of the pickup. Do never use a magnetic screwdriver for doing that, it might really mess up your pickup for good!

About the string tension, it is my feeling that lower tension strings help a lot, you might just start experimenting by lowering the tuning (i.e. the problem B to Bb or A) and see if it gets you to something. If this helps use a lower tension on the b-string (wild guess here: 10.5 - 11).

Try out steel strings instead of nickel, I never tried that but is on my list of experiments.

HTH