I'm blown away at the level of fret wear you experience. Makes me wonder about all the other high level professional guitarists of our world. Do you personally know of other guitarists who disintegrates their frets like you do?
Zakk Wylde is notoriously hard on frets and he favors the Dunlop 6000's. I actually know a few country pickers who use really heavy strings and periodically the string wears divots in the frets, so frequent refretting is required.
For me, I'm playing at least 3-4 hours every morning in my home studio through headphones. Sometimes, I may be practicing for a performance or a recording session, but other times, I may just spend those hours taking random guitar lessons off You Tube. If I know I am going to be recording a particular solo or phrase later that day, I will sometimes pull up a page on the Internet about something I'm interested in, like maybe history or perhaps a written piece on music theory, and with my headphones on, I will just burn off that riff or phrase a few hundred times while reading through the article. Then, on days I go to the studio, I am playing literally all day long as I'm even noodling between projects to keep up my momentum. On nights where I was playing with one of the 3 bands I support, there was another couple of hours of playing, so if you add it up, (3 hours in the morning 6 hours in the day and 2 hours at night) that's around 11 hours of playing on some weekdays.
Then on Saturday, I'm up early for my music class at the academy. I arrive about 10am and set up my Ivanberg Origin 50 and play flat out for my 2 hours of prep time. This might be prepping for the day's instruction, or just enjoying being able to jam at stage volumes. The class kicks off at 12 noon and we spend two hours rehearsing our live setlist, adding songs, or dissecting songs to get them right.
Then, every Saturday afternoon, I am recording from 4 to 10pm with Outfall at their studio, so subtract 2 hours for BS-ing and that's another 4 hours on Saturdays. So, if you even drop the numbers down and round them off to (8) hours of playing each weekday (40 hours) then (4 + 4) on Saturdays, then these guitars are getting 44 hours a week of playing time on them, give or take a few hours and I took yesterday completely off, so no wear took place yesterday.
I'm literally always strumming or picking or just noodling. Sometimes I just sit on the sofa in the early morning and play one of my electrics unplugged, but I am playing constantly.
Kind of like when I wore out my Graph Tech Tusq XL nut, and everyone (even Tusq) said it wasn't possible in that span of time (about 45 days until the strings were ringing off the first fret) and when I told them how many hours I play a week, the tech said, "Holy poop! These nuts are not designed for that! You need brass!"
Interestingly, when I went to brass, all my sting slot wear and binding stopped and never returned.
Now, I actually like the Tusq XL's and I use them on hardtails or where a guy may only play in his bedroom, but there is a reason guys like Yngwie use brass and it's not just sustain, but it's a very long wearing and stable nut material.
Are those frets the Warmoth GD6150?
View attachment 75600
Yes...
they are .100" wide and .057" tall
