Flatwound electric guitar strings, explained: the warm tone behind Julian Lage's Telecaster

In June, jazz guitarist Julian Lage quietly slipped into Bob Dylan's touring band. He stepped out at the Santa Barbara Bowl on June 17 with no announcement and no press release, taking the chair that longtime guitarist Doug Lancio had held since 2021 (Guitar World). The guitar world has been buzzing about it ever since, because Lage is one of the most admired jazz players alive, and nobody quite knows how long the arrangement will last (Rolling Stone).

Here is the part that matters for a strings site. Lage is a jazz virtuoso who plays a Telecaster, not an archtop. A Tele is about the brightest, twangiest electric ever built, and Lage coaxes a warm, singing, almost vocal tone out of it. That tone is not an amp trick or a secret pedal. More than anything, it is the strings. He plays flatwounds, and they are the quiet reason a bright guitar sounds dark and sweet in his hands. The same lesson runs through the warm, woody voice of a hollowbody like the freshly reissued Gibson ES-330: on a warm-leaning guitar, the strings do most of the tone shaping.

Every wound guitar string is a core wire with a second wire wrapped around it. On a normal set, that wrap is round, so the surface of the string has tiny ridges, the ones you feel and hear when your hand slides along the neck. A flatwound swaps the round wrap for a flat ribbon of wire, then polishes the result smooth (D'Addario). The plain treble strings stay the same. It is only the wound strings, the lower ones, that change.

That one change does two things you notice immediately. The surface goes glassy, so your fingers glide and the squeak of a hand moving on wound strings nearly disappears. And the tone rolls back. A flat ribbon damps the bright, jangly overtones that a round wrap rings out, so the string sounds warmer, darker, and more focused, with a smooth attack instead of a sharp one. D'Addario describes the result as a "damped, but tone-rich" voice, and that phrase is exact: you lose sparkle, you gain warmth and body. Underneath, a good flatwound is built like any quality string, a flattened stainless steel ribbon over a high-carbon hex-shaped steel core, so it still tunes up stable and intonates cleanly.

Flatwounds live at the warm end of the tone spectrum, and they suit the players who live there too. Traditional jazz is the heartland: the dense, smooth chord-melody sound of a post-war archtop is a flatwound sound. But the net is wider than that. Rockabilly twang on a Gretsch, R&B and soul rhythm, vintage pop, Western swing, and any warm, low-volume rhythm part all sit beautifully on flats. If your north star is a smooth, vocal, slightly vintage voice, this is your string.

They are not for everyone, and the honest tradeoff is easy to name. Flatwounds give up the bright overtones and the easy, singing bends that modern rock and blues lead playing is built on. Dig into a high bend on a flat and it can feel stiff, and the note will not shimmer the way a roundwound does. If your playing is bend-heavy lead up the neck, or you want a guitar that cuts and sparkles, a flat will frustrate you. This is a warmth string, not a brightness string, and choosing it is choosing a side of that line. For the warmer side of blues, a heavy roundwound such as the D'Addario EJ22 jazz set is the gentler way to lean that direction.

When a player says flatwound electric, they usually mean D'Addario Chromes. It is the most widely played flatwound electric set, made in the United States, and it runs from an Extra Light .010 to .048 (the ECG23) up through Jazz Light and Jazz Medium gauges for heavier hands (D'Addario). It is the set Julian Lage plays. According to his Premier Guitar rig rundown, he runs Chromes around .011 to .050, with one personal tweak: an unwound .020 third string where the stock set carries a wound G, which keeps his bends a touch easier on that string (Premier Guitar). He is a D'Addario artist, and Chromes are listed as his string (D'Addario).

We have not built our full Chromes catalog page yet, so for now the link above goes to D'Addario's own product page, where you can see the gauge lineup. We are adding the verified Chromes set pages to our brand-by-brand catalog next. In the meantime, if you want to hear what a polished flat ribbon does to a bright guitar before you commit, the fastest read is to compare it to the warm roundwound option below.

You do not have to jump straight to a flatwound to chase warmth. There is a halfway house, and for a lot of players it is the smarter first move: a heavy roundwound jazz set with a wound third string. It keeps a little more sparkle and a more familiar feel than a flat, but the heavier gauge and the wound G land most of the warmth. The D'Addario EJ22 Jazz Medium (.013 to .056) is the canonical version, with a wound .026 G that smooths the step from the wound D into the third string and gives chords that dense, even jazz body. A step lighter, the D'Addario EXL115 (.011 to .049) leans warm without asking you to relearn your setup.

Here is the honest side-by-side, so you can pick the right amount of warmth for your playing.

If the word flatwound rings a bell from the bass world, that is no accident. Flats have always been more common on bass than on guitar, and the most famous flatwound tone in music is a bass one: James Jamerson's heavy La Bella flats, the sound under most of the Motown catalog, which he left on for years and refused to swap for brighter rounds. We wrote that story up in full on our James Jamerson profile and our Jamerson flatwound breakout. The bass side has its own full comparison, the flatwound versus roundwound bass guide, and because flats install a little differently from rounds, a how to change flatwound bass strings walkthrough. The lesson travels in both directions: on guitar or bass, a flatwound is the string you reach for when you want warmth and quiet over brightness and bite.