Dear Martin and Ed,
>
> historical fact. I have found the same results with roping,
> that it gives a rather dull sound. The lower tension
> solution seems to be logical.
Do you really think that one could play with basses with a 1N or more less
tended than the other strings? It contrasts with all historical tutorials we
have. They all say that the tactile sensation must be the same on all the
courses and I wholeheartedly agree with them. If there was a problem with
the basses' tension surely they would have talked about this but actually
they said to keep the tension costant more or less.
I think that for 6c a regular gut string particularly twisted as
could be Gamut Pystoys or Aquila Venice is OK. They are not roped but are
like 3-4 thin regular twisted strings twisted again together, when the gut
is still wet, and then polished to the right gauge. This kind of strings
works very well for the V and VI courses of my Renaissance lute but of
course one should not expect a very brilliant tone, like a wound string of
course, and there is no reason to think that a so much brighter bass is
actually better and that it was actually historical. I never had problem in
stopping them together with the plain gut octaves as someone said to have,
it's just a matter of developing a habit.
For deeper strings the only solution is to found a working
technology to load a gut string. Perhaps we haven't found the right one and
I agree that the Aquila loaded strings were almost unusable due to the
problems of intonation but I think in the past they did in some way. For
Baroque lute there are some remnants of original strings (ask Mimmo Peruffo
for this) that show they used demi-filee strings. For the transitional
period when wound string were still not used who knows. There is need for
more experiments, but I would surely draw out any hypothesis of different
tensions amongst courses, just for musical reason.
Francesco
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