guitar

To achieve the bright sound in his famous 1965 solo for The Who‘s “My Generation,” John Entwistle bought a cheap Danelectro bass, removed the strings designed by John D’Addario Sr., and transferred them to his Fender. The plan worked until one of the strings broke — and Entwistle had to buy two more Danelectros just for the strings. 
Jim D’Addario, who built a multimillion-dollar guitar-strings empire on the foundation of his late father John’s early innovations, tells this story in a 50th-anniversary video series called Jim’s Corner. D’Addario, which sells drumheads, saxophone reeds, pedalboards, earplugs and other musicians’ gear in addition to its signature guitar strings at 3,300 retail outlets, earned $220 million in global revenue last year and employs 1,100 people, has taken a corporate victory lap throughout, combining history with “When You Know You Know” ads starring younger players like Chris Stapleton, Herman Li of DragonForce and Yvette Young of Covet.

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“Most people are very apathetic about their strings, and they usually listen to their teacher, or an artist that’s endorsing the product, to get them to try our strings,” says D’Addario, now chairman of the board of the company he named after his family in 1974. “The ones that know really know ours are better — and consistent.”

In addition to the video series, the company that started with teenaged Jim accompanying his guitar-playing father to music-business trade conventions in the ’60s launched a beer, Eddie Ate Dynamite (GoodBye Eddie), in early December; held a beer-launch party at the time starring a member of the Infamous Stringdusters; and spent much of 2024 releasing limited-edition merch and packages of strings in retro containers.

D’Addario acknowledges the company faces industry headwinds — the musical-instrument business, he says, is declining 2%-3% per year, which affects a company whose guitar strings make up 45% of its business. “People buy a guitar for their kid, and if he doesn’t play, they don’t put it in the attic or the basement anymore. They put it on eBay,” D’Addario says. “Everything a dealer sells, he’s going to compete with that instrument. That has had a very serious effect on the instruments bought at retail.”

But mostly, D’Addario is upbeat, describing the guitar pedalboards his company has spent two years designing, pedalboard power supplies containing USB batteries and coated strings that resist “moisture, perspiration, skin, debris.” Says D’Addario, “We keep an ideation list for each brand. We’ll have crazy things on there. When we have bandwidth, we’ll throw one on the active-project list.” Here, he discusses the company’s past and present in an hourlong Zoom from his home workshop in Farmingdale, N.Y.

What do you hope people learn about D’Addario from the 50th-anniversary campaign events?

It’s not the 50th anniversary of the family making strings, it’s the 50th anniversary of the brand name D’Addario. My dad and my grandfather were afraid to put their name on products. Italians would be discriminated against and it was a difficult name to pronounce. They felt like, in certain markets, it might not be accepted. In August of ’74, I said, “Nah, we’re going to get credit for making certain stuff, and our name’s going to be on it.”

Can you hear when a guitar player on the radio uses your strings?

No, that’s impossible. There are a lot of good strings out there that sound good. It’s very hard to discern that just from listening to it on the radio.

In the early 1990s, a package of strings had an envelope for each of the six strings — a paper envelope for each one, identified for each note, in a vinyl pouch with a fancy label. So there was a minimum of eight pieces of packaging; sometimes there was a little advertisement as well. My daughter Amy was in high school, and they were studying environmental friendliness and recycling and packaging, and I was changing my strings on the bed and I had all this garbage when I was done. She said, “You should really do something about that, that’s really criminal, you’re putting so much junk in the waste-stream just to change a set of strings.”

So it got me thinking. I came up with a system of color-coding the ball end on the string a different color, then coiling those together in one corrosion-resistant plastic bag and having them color-coded, so the silver one is this note and the brass one is this note. It eliminated 75% of the packaging. Since that time, we’ve saved billions of trees and millions of pounds of carbon not released into the atmosphere. That was one of the things that distinguished our strings. That’s one way we can tell onstage if our strings are being used. Otherwise, it’s very difficult. You can put branding on the package but when they’re playing on stage you can’t see it.

What music stars are your most loyal customers? 

A lot of jazz guys, like Pat Metheny, who’s a good buddy, and Julian Loge. But there’s also a whole contingent of new people that I might not know. John McLaughlin, Blake Mills, Molly Tuttle, Billy Strings, Chris Thile of Nickel Creek, Sierra Ferrell, a mandolinist [who’s] going to be a superstar — those are the artists that really gravitate to our brand because they know they’re going to get the very best product.

How has the musical instrument market changed since you started?

It’s quite different. We also make drumheads and drumsticks and snare wires and guitar straps and cables. We make drumheads for acoustic drums and drumsticks and other accessories for drummers. The acoustic-drum market is 40-60% of what it was in 2004. Drums have been digitized. Instead of 20,000 drumheads a day, we’re only making 10,000. The other thing is the guitar was really the solo instrument, but it’s not anymore. You don’t hear a guitar solo in every hit; you hear repetitive rhythms and electronic sounds and synthesized sounds.

How much does this worry you?

We’ve seen this so many times — in the early ’90s, it was video games, and for three or four years, the guitar market didn’t have much growth. But then it came back. The acoustic guitar market was in the tank for the whole decade of the 1980s, and “MTV Unplugged” happened, then bingo, the acoustic guitar took off again. It always comes back.

What are your retirement plans, if any?

We don’t want to sell our business. Our family name is on the product. D’Addario strings are like the Titleist of golf balls, like Scotch Tape. When you walk into a music store, 40% to 50% of the strings on the wall are our brand, and that’s in almost every country around the world. I’d have trouble walking into a store and seeing my packaging screwed up or listening to people complaining about the quality.