In 1973 Robert Hird joined Virgil Lay in his already very successful Akron Ohio guitar repair and customizing shop located in the basement below another business. Sometime in 1980 Virgil found a way to stabilize thin slinky rock strings so that they would stay in tune under stress of pushing, vibrato and modern playing conditions. So in 1980 "Stay-In-Tune" Strings was born, and Virgil and Robert found a host of improvements both in sound and playability that could be done to modern musical instruments strings. Today, SIT Strings is known and distributed around the world in about 56 different countries. And through it all, it was strongly believed that each and every string had to have the individual quality of the best SIT string ever made.