Switching to a lighter guage string.

[Suppalak Klabdee]

I had an accident a few years ago which ended up with both the pinky and ring fingers on my left hand broken and dislocated. I re-strung all my guitars with Ernie super slinky's (9-42's) as I couldn't handle regular strings. I stuck with them for two years until I decided my strength was sufficient to go back to a heavier gauge string. I use 10's on all of them now with the exception of my semi-acoustic which has 12's on it. During these shenanigans I never had to do a thing to any of the guitar set up's at all. Swapping from one string gauge to another and back caused no problems whatever.

Also, I can highly recommend playing guitar as a recuperative method after finger or hand trauma!!:congrats:

I repeatedly played Metallica's Creeping Death main riff to recover from a car accident many years ago. It works!

As for the string gauge, I use Elixir Nanoweb 10-46 on most of my electrics. Just recently switch to 9-46 on my Brushstroke 24 and love it though!

 

[gball]

I had an accident a few years ago which ended up with both the pinky and ring fingers on my left hand broken and dislocated. I re-strung all my guitars with Ernie super slinky's (9-42's) as I couldn't handle regular strings. I stuck with them for two years until I decided my strength was sufficient to go back to a heavier gauge string. I use 10's on all of them now with the exception of my semi-acoustic which has 12's on it. During these shenanigans I never had to do a thing to any of the guitar set up's at all. Swapping from one string gauge to another and back caused no problems whatever.

Also, I can highly recommend playing guitar as a recuperative method after finger or hand trauma!!:congrats:

I feel ya man! I had an accident many years ago that crushed the ring finger of my fretting hand and took the last few millimeters of bone off the finger. Still have an enormous scar right in the middle of my finger that runs from the nail bed and around the front for about 3/4 of an inch. It regularly gets very sore after playing for several hours.

When I had the accident I couldn't play at all for about a month because the finger was in a cast and after that I could barely use it to fret the guitar for at least a year because of the pain, so I switched to lighter strings - I think at one point early on I was using Dean Markley 8's! - and relearned many of the chord shapes to leave that finger out as much as possible. To this day I fret a lot of things weirdly and people are always asking me what chord I am playing. Eventually I built up enough of a callous to move back up, but I have never been able to go higher than 10's without pain, so that's where I am at - 10's on all my electrics.

 

[Rachmaninoff]

ZZ Top gets great tone with 7s.

I used to use .008 gauge, but now I'm using Billy Gibbons' signature .007 gauge:
http://www.jimdunlop.com/product/rev-willys-strings

I'm totally addicted to it, but always liked low tension strings, it's not for everyone really... :flute:

An interesting point about the Billy Gibbons' signature strings (he has .007, .008, .009 and .010 gauges) is that the individual strings are more balanced among them, with different individual gauges than the most commonly found on other brands. Mr. Gibbons really knows his thing.