Thanks Dan, That's encouraging. I don't think we should be content with flexibility in just the basses, though. It may or may not be so important for the trebles and means, but the old trebles and means were indeed flexible and I think lute string makers should be trying to emulate this throughout the range. When any strings I order come in the form of 'bundles of knots', I'll feel we're approaching something like what the old ones were doing.
I'm not too familiar with Gamut's terminology. I know that Mace describes pistoys as "none other than thick Venice-Catlins, which are commonly dyed, with a deep dark red colour." Is that the case? It looks like things are indeed progressing. Bill From: Dan Winheld <dwinh...@lmi.net> To: William Samson <willsam...@yahoo.co.uk> Cc: Lute List <lute@cs.dartmouth.edu> Sent: Friday, 30 November 2012, 19:10 Subject: [LUTE] Re: Gut strings - The elephant in the room Bill- In fact, some of the string makers are well aware of the stiffness factor; and have been trying to cope with it, and are coming up with increasingly flexible bass (where of course it matters most) strings. I have recently been able to go to an all gut "Pistoy" of Dan Larson for the 8th course fundamental of my Renaissance lute. About 63 cm, nominal G tenor, AA5, about 1.74 mm diameter string. Very flexible, no problems at all tying it around on the bridge, unlike so many previous attempts with gut or gut substitute strings of this thickness. And it sounds fabulous. With a 9 or 10 course lute of the right size and of this quality in string and instrument I would have no hesitation going down to the low C fundamental. I believe Mimmo Peruffo has also been trying to tame the elephant. Dan On 11/30/2012 10:30 AM, William Samson wrote: > Looking at all the discussion we've been having about gut strings - to > load, or not to load, to wind or not to wind, to twist or not to twist > . . . - one thing that hasn't come up for a while is how different > modern gut seems to be from the old stuff. > > When you look at old pictures showing gut being used to string a lute, > or the loose ends of gut hanging from a pegbox, it's clear that it was > much softer stuff than the wire-like gut we have today. For a start it > came in hanks. Try tying modern gut in a hank and it would look like > crap when you unravel it - kinked, cracked, opaque . . . I have no > knowledge of the differences between the manufacturing process for > modern gut and that used long ago, but it must have been quite > different. > > What difference would stiffness make? One possible difference is > inharmonicity - the tendency of harmonics to be sharper in stiffer > strings. This is something that piano tuners have to allow for > routinely - because of the stiff wire strings. That's just a guess, > though, and we won't know for sure until somebody makes old-style soft > gut and performs a comparison. I'd have thought this would be a fairly > straightforward thing for gut makers to do. Maybe somebody has already > done it? > > Bill > > -- > > > To get on or off this list see list information at > [1]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html > -- References 1. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
