Roger Siminoff’s Straight Up Strings has announced Elderly Instruments as the exclusive online retailer for their new banjo and mandolin string sets. These are the sets that Roger designed to ensure that each string – or set of pairs for mandolin – exerts equal downward tension on the bridge, resulting in a more uniform string-to-string response.
The sets will be available to brick-and-mortar music stores and shops, but online sales will be restricted to the Elderly and Siminoff web sites.
Roger says that they came to this agreement just recently.
“We met with Stan (Werbin) at IBMA’s World of Bluegrass, and after about three minutes of describing what we were doing, Stan immediately latched on the to concept. We’re happy to partner with Elderly Instruments because they really understand what we’ve done with the technology and are as enthusiastic as we are about spreading the word.”
Straight Up Strings has also announced their first batch of professional endorsers. Phil Barker, mandolinist with Town Mountain, Adam Roszkiewicz from Front Country, and Caleb Klauder with Foghorn Stringband have all committed to using Straight Ups in their recordings and live performances.
Roger has dedicated several years of analysis to determining how to wrap and gauge his string sets to compensate for the difference in distance from the posts for mandolin bridges, and for the fact that three banjo strings are positioned directly over a foot, and two aren’t. He is convinced that these new sets counter this issue.
You can read more about his research online.
