Hi, David seems to be fanatical about his gut strings and in turn not quite open to the qualities of nylgut.
I use nylgut for the top four courses on my renaissance lutes and renaissance guitars. It is very rare that I have to retune at all during a concert. But this may also be due to the quality of my Martin Shepherd lutes. A few weeks I had a concert with my renaissance ensemble in a theater and the hot spotlights gave me extreme tuning problems with metal strings of my cittern, but my lutes stayed well in tune. Nylgut does stretch and I have to change the topstring of my g'lute about 4 times a year, because it just gets too thin. I am sure that many people perform well with all gut strings, but I been witness to lute players who spent almost as long tuning their gut strings in a concert as they played pieces. best wishes Mark To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
