Herbert, I can't answer your question with regard to lute experience, but I think you would find that once the strings were stable in a range of pitch you could up-tune or down-tune 100 cents and have the string remain stable. Whether the lute tuning would remain stable is another question, what sets the soundboard might take that would change the overall tune is beyond my experience. But I play double strung harp (which means that, like the lute, I want my paired courses to be exactly the same), and I am regularly changing the string length with levers for the half tones on key changes. And some of those in my ensemble don't have levers and regularly change the string tension to switch key signatures. Admittedly the harp is a different instrument, but as the pull on the soundboard is direct rather than transmitted downward across a bridge I'd think the deformation of the soundboard would be greater in the harp for the change of tension.
So my best guess is that once the string is "seasoned" to a general pitch it will retain any pitch within a half tone or so. The exception might be the chaterelle as it is normally tuned very near its breaking point. If this is contrary to lute experience then I'd guess that factors other than string stability would be involved. A harp may not be a lute, but a string is a string (if it is the same material, and harpists use gut, wire and nylon with similar retuning experience). Best, Jon ----- Original Message ----- From: "Herbert Ward" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <lute@cs.dartmouth.edu> Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2005 1:05 PM Subject: Stability of tuning. > > > Suppose you took a lute and turned half the pegs up 5-15 cents, > and half the pegs down 5-15 cents, so that its tuning was com- > pletely clobbered. > > Now suppose you handed the lute to a person who was very good > at tuning lutes, and knew all the tricks. Could he tune the lute > so that it would still be in tune 24-48 hours later? Or is there > something fundamentally unstable about such a freshly-tuned lute > which defies any level of tuning know-how? > > > > To get on or off this list see list information at > http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html > > >
