Dear Taco and All, Preferred sring tension obviously varies a bit between people. I find 40N OK for a single top string on a 60cm lute, dropping to about 30N for (double) second course and 28N for most of the rest.
Opinion amongst modern stringmakers seems to be that the thinnest string which could be made with the old technology is more than .40mm, and if true this has interesting implications for the pitch at which the old instruments might have been played, as you say. In discussing "archlutes" I think we must be careful to distinguish the "continuo archlute" (with string lengths of perhaps 67/145cm and single basses) from the solo "liuto attiorbato" (58/85 or 64/93 and double basses). Solo lutes could obviously be tuned to any pitch, though of course the pressure to go for a high pitch would have been strong (to allow thinner bass strings). Continuo really raises the issue of pitch, as you say. I would regard it as normal to tune a 67cm lute in F (modern pitch) but stronger gut treble strings might allow a higher pitch - how much higher would depend on how thin a string could be made, to keep the tension within reasonable limits. Best wishes, Martin Taco Walstra wrote: >Has anybody an answer to the following. >Archlutes often have a stringlength of about 65 cm. Tuning at 415 hz gives for >a gut topstring a tension of 40 N, which is very high. My experience so far >is that a gut string of 0.40 mm (I take 1350 kg/m3) is dying within an hour. >I.e. not breaking but damaged due to the high tension. Fortunately I have >some 0.38 and even 0.36 mm gut strings. The last is working fine. But a 0.36 >mm string is something which is perhaps possible with modern stringmachines >but in the past it was surely not. And I know only one stringmaker who is >making these. So what was put on for example a sellas in the past? Was >everything tuned down to 392 Hz? Some instruments were even 67 cm, so how to >handle such an instrument without using carbon strings? >Taco Walstra > > > >To get on or off this list see list information at >http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html > > > >
