My main guitar these days is a Taylor “Big Baby”; it’s a 15/16 scale dreadnought with an enormous voice for its size. When I bought it, from the excellent World Guitars in Lapworth, it was strung with Elixir Nanoweb strings, and I’ve stuck with them ever since.

Until now.

For years I’ve been a rhythm guitarist and flatpicker but in the past few months I’ve been doing a lot of fingerpicking on mountain dulcimer and, to an extent, on the autoharp, and it seemed to make sense to transfer this to guitar. So, armed with my trusty “claws” - steel Jim Dunlop fingerpicks - I set about the Taylor with gusto.

Within a couple of days of heavy fingerpicking abuse the guitar developed some horrible string buzz. I wondered if I’d got some unexpected bridge wear, so changed the strings just to be certain. Sure enough, everything was fine once the new strings were on. But only for a couple of days.

The string buzz came back. Then I noticed that the plastic coating of the Elixir strings was coming off in shavings because of the scraping action of the steel picks. This was what was creating the buzz.

Admittedly, I can be pretty heavy-handed but am surprised that I can wear Elixir strings out in a matter of days - especially when they’ll last me months when playing rhythm or flatpicking. Has anyone else had this happen?

I’ve switched back, for now, to Martin strings and everything is hunky-dory.