Not that I've seen. Personally, I think it's much more a matter of how you have your pickups/tone controls/amp/recording tracks or whatever set up than a matter of which flat-wound strings you're using. I have TI Jazz flats on both fretted and fretless Hofners and my Hagstrom 8-string and I can get all the "click" that I would ever want from them. I'm not a fan of Pyramids and have never heard them do anything that I can't do with other strings that are easier on both my guitars and my fingers, so if I get a guitar with them, the first thing I do is take them off, throw them away and readjust the neck.I have read that Thomastik TI Flats just won't have that same characteristic click no matter what. Is that true?
Plus, strings age and their sound tends to change a bit as they do. Being able to dial-in the tone you want with the knobs and pickup adjustments, rather than relying on the strings makes sense to me. My old fretless Gibson has had the same strings on it since 1975 - and they're tape-wounds at that. As far as I can tell by comparing it to studio recordings from those days, it sounds about the same, and the bright channel providing the click is just as bright as it used to be. Here is a short clip with a few seconds of the combined sound, followed by the bridge pickup (a P-Bass pickup) channel alone, then the neck pickup (Gibson mudbucker) channel alone and finally, the reassembled combination of the two signals. Back when I used to play out with the band I used a two-channel Acoustic head and Sunn 18" folded horn combo, which would yield both a lot of low end thunder when desired and very focused percussion to the notes.
http://webpages.charter.net/tbradshaw/M ... n%20LP.MP3
There is a sample here of the 8-string with the TI strings on it (TI flats on all eight strings, electronics factory mono-wired and unchanged). I can't really imagine needing more click.
Go to the "My Middle Name" sample on the second column.
http://www.theshipmusic.com/all_come_home_album.html
