strings.

Thomastiks are steel. Golden Spirals, BTW, are gut, not nylon.

Getting back to the original query, the fact is that a considerable number (a plurality, if not a majority) of serious bluegrbutt bbutt players use steel - Thomastik Spirocores and, more lately, D'addario Helicores. I don't know of any that have ever had any problems from "too much pressure on the bridge." Smaller numbers use gut - or, like Tom Gray, a gut-steel combination - or what I've been using for the last two years or so, which is the LaBella 7710s, nylon tape on a rope core. Gut is relatively low tension, but expensive and requires a certain amount of ongoing maintenance; gut strings also take forever to stretch out. The tension on the LaBellas is roughly equivalent to that of Spirocores, so you don't gain anything in that regard, but they start off with a smoother tone - steel strings take some weeks of fairly regular playing to lose the metallic edge to their sound - and retain that relative to steel across the life of the string. Interestingly, I've had a couple of queries about the 7710s from gut string players in the last couple of months.

If you're finding the bbutt too hard to play, the problem is more like the string height than the tension of the strings per se. See about getting it lowered.

-- Jon Weisberger