Much depends on your technique and whether you play close to the bridge (as the Old Ones generally seemed to have done) or up to the rose. However whatever tension you decide upon, with such a small instrument why don't you follow historical practice and only lower the first course an octave? The stress of the second course at such a short string length (at , say, A 415) is well below breaking stress.
MH --- On Wed, 10/8/11, David Smith <d...@dolcesfogato.com> wrote: From: David Smith <d...@dolcesfogato.com> Subject: [BAROQUE-LUTE] Lute Strings for theorbo To: baroque-lute@cs.dartmouth.edu Date: Wednesday, 10 August, 2011, 18:22 Greetings, I have a Barber and Harris Lesser French Theorbo with 14 strings (7x1 and 7x1) with lengths of 760mm and 1400mm. The 7 diapasons are gut but the other are carbon fiber and silver wrapped. I bought the instrument used and would like to convert to all gut. I have looked at Arto's string calculator and am stumped as to what I should use for the tension on the strings. The I am not sure what the current set of gut diapasons are either. So a couple of questions: 1. Should I replace all the strings in order to get the correct balance on the instrument? 2. What tension for the strings should I be looking for? 3. Is the best approach to just go to Aquila or Gamut and ask them to figure it out? I would appreciate any guidance I can get. I have read through some of the other discussions but have not come to enough understanding to know how to proceed. Thank you in advance. Regards David -- To get on or off this list see list information at [1]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html -- References 1. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html