When I suggest roughly polished strings instead of smooth heavily polished ones, I often receive a squint like I am interfering with personal choices on musical taste, or with technical issues of an instrument which I have never seen, let alone played.  It’s always been difficult for me to explain why I am firm on this

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Roughly Polished

“I couldn’t play without varnished strings. Yes, I know they are not historically correct, but there is no other way for me, as my hands are so sweaty and I am so busy, that I move from hard air-conditioned to hot and humid environments even trice per day.”Is this familiar to you? I hear this

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Varnished strings

What shall we look in paintings Pictures from an exhibition in Venaria Reale, Torino (Italy), of restaured masterpieces from Renaissance. I loved that “soft” string…

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Quality of strings from a painting

Good gut strings: where do they come from? What does really make a difference for the quality of a gut string: in my opinion, the first factor which really affects the final quality of a string is that the numbers of gut strands used is balanced to the gauge we want to obtain. This is

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What makes a good gut string?

Breaks are not unpredictable, they’re just one of the many things we have to learn how to avoid Short life of the string: unfortunately a common problem today. Let’s try to give it a definition so that we can understand when our strings are normally working, and we just have to accept there is a

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issues to manage or to refuse?

What can we do to have longer lasting strings? So many factors determine the length of the life of the strings, but if you look at them one at a time, you will find that it is quite easy to understand what’s wrong and what we can improve. Often it’s something we can improve straight

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strings breaking too often?

Do you ever struggle during a concert for false intonation… just to discover that while your pure gut strings were going down, the wound ones were going up? please comment below to share your experience and suggestions!

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Tuning problems with wound strings

How the gauge is determined at the polishing and on half polished and smooth strings…. Can you guess why you can never be sure of the quality of a polished string? Want to know more? There’s a downloadable report here, it’s free, no opt-in!

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Polishing and gauging

Why I don’t like varnished strings: Maybe if you live in a very humid place, like Vietnam or Japan, it looks like this is the only solution. It may be true in fact if you want to buy a “ready to use” string.But if you have the patience of organizing your olive oil process and

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Varnished or not Varnished

That’s me , or at least this is what I was in Aquila from 2002 up to 2016… On gauge imposed on a string by the polishing process… why half polished are definitely better and why the quality control and the polishing must be done by the same person. Want to know more? There’s a

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The Conscious Polisher

Everything it’s said in this great video is valid also for gut wound strings. Really clearly explained. We had round or ground wound (hand polished) until…. 1910 when Thomastick patented a machine to wound with flat wire.

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Wound Strings Features

Is Gauge what really matters most when we are looking for the right string? Yes, of course, Gauge is an objective measurable factor in a string. Easy measurable. And it is the thing early music brands use to label a string, so it is universally accepted as THE thing we should matter of. I am not

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Is Gauge the main thing?

What to check and what to avoid when you are choosing your strings. The most important thing to check is that the twisting of your string is even in the whole vibrating lenght. No white spots, no open twist, no different angles. You can easily feel those by Mersenne’s test. What is less important is the

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Quality of the string

What happens to a string while polishing. (one more way to save money) The difference between a slightly polished string and a perfectly smooth string and why it is definitely worth to choose the first One. Want to know more? There’s a downloadable report here, it’s free, no opt-in required!

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Polished or Rough Strings