Thread of Time: Jim D’Addario’s five-decades (and counting) of tinkering (Excerpt)

I probably should have disqualified myself from this interview.

After all, I loathe changing strings. Case in point: There’s a ’30s Gibson L-00 here that Bill Frisell once played. I know I haven’t changed its strings since that moment. I just checked my phone videos. That moment was in 2016.

I could fill a whole 50-minute therapy session with excuses for my string procrastination: Laziness; worries that I’ll “jinx it;” and, of course, the irrational fear that I’ll somehow possibly poke my eye out.

Sadly, Jim D’Addario can’t help me with any of that.

But he can show me how guitar strings are made, better than pretty much anyone. He can walk me through string history. He can give me a tour of D’Addario’s jaw-dropping factory, including many machines that he modified with his own two hands. He can also talk for hours about luthiers he’s met along the way, what they were like, and how they’ve inspired the products that we all use today.

And, it turns out, he can probably design and 3D print an iPad holder for my next Zoom call with my shrink.

I discover this as I’m fussing with my recorder and camera tripod for this interview in Jim’s Long Island office. It was his first day back at D’Addario’s Farmingdale, New York, campus after a long weekend. While Jim was gone, inspiration hit. Using his home 3D printer, he mocked up his latest invention to show to his employees. (I won’t spill the beans, but this one was for the violin crowd.) The design made perfect sense, and I fully expect to see it mass-produced and for sale in 2025. It also reaffirmed my hunch that Jim D’Addario may just be the most fascinating guy currently working in the gear industry, even if no one knows it.

Walking around D’Addario’s sprawling Long Island campus in Farmingdale, New York, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed. I have seen my fair share of large-scale guitar factories and distribution centers. Yet nothing prepared me for this. From the outside, the buildings are nondescript industrial park affairs. Inside, they are humming with activity.

And it’s inside where nearly a thousand employees craft some 800,000 strings a day. I’ll say it again: 800,000 strings…a day. Some of the machinery is older than me, others are state-of-the-art affairs and come with strict orders not to photograph them. Some winding machines see three different work shifts every 24 hours. There’s a laboratory where stress testing takes place and strings are randomly being examined for quality control under electron microscopes. There’s a state-of-the-art Heidelberg printing press that I’m pretty sure is far nicer and newer than the one this very magazine was printed on. There’s a two-story tall machine that takes rolls of flat cardboard to make custom-size boxes on the fly, any size you want. And, of course, there are strings of every stripe: coated, uncoated, every gauge imaginable, bass strings, banjo strings, mandolin strings, racks upon racks of accessories. There are also whole aisles of strings made by D’Addario for other companies to sell under their own name.

Throughout our walk, Jim gleefully plays tour guide. He knows every machine’s function and nearly every employee’s name. Some of these machines he actually cobbled together from other machines back in the ’70s, before he wore a dress shirt to work. In a real pinch, it feels like he could still throw an apron on and fix most of them. (I’m betting this scenario would actually make him quite happy.)

He makes the whole thing—starting a business, running a business, flourishing as a business for five decades—seem easy. “You come up with products that solve a problem for the musician,” he says. “That’s our goal. We want to be invisible to them, so that they get inspired to play better and play more and not think about the string that’s not staying in tune or breaks or whatever.”

While I am mesmerized by all the machinery, Jim throws out terms like “input wire,” “temper,” and “tin adhesion.” He tells me about the type of films needed—and avoided—when it comes to coated strings. I get the story of Pat Metheny and his chrome XLs. I hear about the benefits of hexagon cores and challenges of flat-wound strings. I learned that guitar strings start out as one carbon steel wire that goes through a series of dies, a spaghetti-versus-angel-hair situation. “Our wire is so consistent that a large majority of my competitors buy the material from us,” he says in passing, a recurring theme that we’ll hear more about later. I’m also learning about vertical integration, suspension bridge construction (the carbon steel wire that makes for great guitar strings also works on the Brooklyn Bridge), and the golf game of late lutherie hero Mario Maccaferri.

Read the entire story in our 55th issue, out now. Photos: Christopher Beauchamp