D'Addario (and all the brands they supply strings for) are my absolute least favorite ever. They sound zingy when new and dead as a stump when they age, and the unwound strings have a strange feel, like they are unfinished or something. Not to mention the stupid colored ball-ends. It's amazing they are so popular to me.
Y’know, G, some day you need to splurge and treat yourself to a set of the Thomastik-Infeld Blues Sliders. At $23.95 a pack they are expensive. That’s why I don’t have them on all my guitars, but they are a real level above most other strings, in my opinion.
They‘re made in Vienna, Austria. They have a coating on the plain strings that makes them very smooth, but they are darker, almost bronze-colored. They almost feel like they have been polished - completely unlike that unfinished feel you mentioned in D’Addario. I totally get what you mean; I had felt that on the D’Addario strings, too. The Thomstik strings are completely the opposite. They’re smooth and precise.
The wound strings are all .001 larger than what you normally see. That is because a silk thread is wrapped with the core of the strings. It has the effect of giving the string a balanced, warm tone, but not dull.
Overall, these are also the most noise free strings I’ve used.
The way I ended up using them is a fluke, in a way. For my 50th birthday my wife wanted to get me a new guitar. I had mentioned I’d like another SG - a “full, fat“ SG, as our English friends might say. She ended up getting me this 2014 SG Original 2 off of eBay. The fluke is that the seller was none other than dampsneaker, from the ETSG forum! Anyway, he had the Thomastiks on that SG and we traded emails after I received the guitar. He told me how he had tried numerous different strings on the guitar and these sounded the best. I ended up experimenting, but came back to the Thomastiks.
Anyhoo, just something to think about.
Here’s kind of a close-up on my guitar:
