>- I wonder if there are there people who use all gut and nails. I did for a while. I started life as a guitar player with nails on nylon. Then included lutes with nails on carbon and overspuns to the collection. The sound was singing, strong and very clear. Very clean too, which made it a bit detached, not very 'human'. I borrowed a romantic guitar with nylgut, the string that is destroying the ears of large numbers of lute players out there as it combines the worst characteristics of nylon and gut while not incorporating any of the the good characteristics of either; I think it will take a couple of decades to make people recognise the damage these strings are doing to tone shaping and articulation. Anyway, it did lead me to have gut on my own romantic guitar. I fell in love with the possibilities of expression of those strings. From there, I changed to gut on my lutes, but still with nails. I think the sound was ok, but missing the 'human' touch, it still was a bit detached. So I clipped my nails. This improved my expressive possibilities on the strings. More nuances in dynamics, articulation and tone colour. But it took a long time to adjust. I think the life span of my trebles was not much affected by nails or no nails. I had short, smoothly polished nails with did not scratch. The tips of my fingers can be rougher and leave more damage on the strings. YMMV David
-- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
