AquilaNew Nylgut AQ-5B Banjo Strings – Medium Tension DBGDG-Set of 5

If you want a more punky banjo sound, use these strings. They're easy on the right hand fingernails, and super easy on the left hand fingertips. They're a joy to play. Tie a loop on the end at the tailpiece. To make them grab your tuning pegs, loop them over and around the peg and they won't slip. Once installed, grab one at about the 12th fret area and pull. It also helps to stretch them up and down the whole length of each string. Doing this saves about 3 days if you were to wait for them to stretch by themselves. Someone here said buy the minstrel set. No. The minstrel set is for the lower D tuning and that set has a bad silk and steel wound fourth that quickly corrodes and splits. This Classical set is for a modern Clawhammer banjo with the normal modern neck, NOT a minstrel banjo or Seeger long neck. These strings do NOT break. They're tough and sound great. Sometimes people have cheap banjos with sharp edges on the tailpiece or tuner hole and yes that could break a string. These strings are a lot fatter than steel so you may have to enlarge the slots on your bridge and nut. People use folded sandpaper or small needle files to do this but the best way is to buy a set of Welding Tip Cleaners on Amazon for a few bucks - these make perfect string sized little round files. I've been using these strings and slotting technique for many years. Good luck. Ask a question here if you need advice.

Old time sound modern convenience

They're nice and sound nice but the first string was a bit knicked and snapped while tuning. So far the other 4 are fine and hopefully they stay that way so I can eventually play when they stretch and get tuned. Tried to contact support, Amazon takes you to the Aquila website, they'll email you back and say to contact Amazon

Loved the sound. Perfect!

Need to be tensioned much tighter than steel to come up to pitch for standard banjo tuning. In so doing, 2 of the 5 strings snapped. The others sound nice and hold pitch as well as any other banjo string once played in. These also are very unforgiving in terms of length when it comes to tying them on. Cmon, a couple more inches for tying is too much for you to part with? If you like knotting tiny lengths of nylon line, these are right up your alley

My top string broke within a half hour of putting it on. The strings take a long time to stretch out so most of that half hour I was tuning it and not playing much. It was tuned to standard tuning. There was enough left of the string to put it back on but now I am afraid to tune it all the way to standard tuning until it stretches out for a week. I would not buy these again even though I like the sound. I could return them or exchange them but they are on the banjo and I don't want to take them off.

These strings can't stretch to standard pitch. If you're tuning down a full step or more they should work. Otherwise they are complete and utter garbage. Waste of money.

These dont have a wound 4th string. The minstrel nylgut set does, and sounds better for it