Dunlop Heavy Core strings (or similar)

TTBZ

Are those Dunlop Heavy Core strings a gimmick or do they actually hold tension better than standard strings in lower tunings?

Just struggling with getting a nice balance between tension/tuning stability, feel and tone. This is for D standard/drop C on a 24.75" guitar. For reference I like D'addario 10-52 in standard E, but the wound strings sound like rubber bands down a step and don't hold tune well with my heavy handed picking. I've just fitted some D'addario 11-56 which are pretty good on the wound strings, but the plain ones sound dull and feel plinky for lack of a better word! Especially the 3rd which is a 19. They just don't ring out nicely like you'd expect new strings to, and I do a lot of open string droney stuff with my chords (stealing from Mastodon) so this isn't ideal!

Thinking I might just have to compromise and get the Ernie Ball 10-54 set, but was wondering if these Heavy Core ones would let me use their 10-48 set without the wound strings sounding like sloppy rubber bands. Not sure I want to go down the custom set path, I'd rather just stick to off the shelf stuff if I can. Otherwise a 10.5-54 hybrid set would probably be nice, but I don't think anyone makes that as a normal set.

skunkwerx

When I did this on an Esp (i forget the scale length) I had to use a wound g else it just sounded awful. But I can’t remember the plain gauges I tried before.

TTBZ

Yeah hoping to avoid a wound 3rd cause they feel cack to me as well! Annoyingly I know a 25.5" scale guitar would solve my problems as 10-52 is good on that for this tuning. But I just don't enjoy playing longer scale guitars, it may just be a mental thing but I have small hands and the shorter Gibson scale feels so much more at home to me, I play much better on it. 

Might just go with my original plan of a Digitech Drop and keep it set up in standard with 10-52. 

grungebob

I think your always going to be working against the scale length for that tuning and desired string gauge.