Dear All, My experiences with Sofracob gut are much the same as David's - fine for everything except a top string. I recently tried to order some fret gut from them and they wrote back to say that they no longer supply fret gut - dommage! Anyone know of a good source of fret gut?
By the way, I found the banjo strings quite strong and very cheap when you get two out of a length. I wonder who manufactures them? The issue about single gut is interesting. I always thought that the thinnest string had to be made out of two whole guts laid thick end to thin end, because of the taper. Even then, the finished string might taper somewhat. But the really interesting thing about this is just how thin could the old guys have made their strings? If two guts are needed, the answer is supposedly in the region of .43mm, and that places some interesting constraints on just how high a pitch you can tune to for a given string length - not because the string might break but because of the uncomfortably high tension involved. Can anyone (Mimmo? Dan?) shed more light on this? And while we're at it, I thought the old guys had to use whole guts as the basis for their strings, because the splitting horn wasn't invented until the 18th C. True or false? Best wishes, Martin LGS-Europe wrote: >> I'm also interested in the responses that Universale's strings are >>particularly strong - I wonder if they wholesale supply some better known >>companies who may not actually make their own gut from scratch (eg >>Kurschner)? >> >> > >I always understood, but I do not know, mind you, that Sofracob supplies >some (?) smaller string makers. Sofracob's main product is wholesale gut for >the medical industrie (10.000.000 meters of catgut yearly, they boast on >their website). Their musical strings are a later by-product and they only >supply treble gut and double twist, no bass strings like Mimmo or Dan make. >They have varnished and non-varnished and they have fret-gut. And as I said >before, they are very cheap. No wonder, with such a high volume output. > >David > > >**************************** >David van Ooijen >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >www.davidvanooijen.nl >**************************** > > > > >To get on or off this list see list information at >http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html > > >
