James Hill playing on gut strings
James Hill, Great ukulele virtuoso from Canada, playing a romantic song on my uke strung with gut strings… can’t you feel the sound of the 30s?
Read MoreHow many truths in this short clip?
1. For sure, when you learn to master gut strings you will have a good sound with any instrument or strings, you will earn your personal sound
2. The gestures, are the one of a truth string maker (or of a butcher). I can assure you, it’s like when you see an actor pretending he is playing cello, or a true cello player (so, they were more accurate in the string maker gesture than in the musician’s).
3. Ok, we do not use cat guts nor humans... but anyway it is a strong reference to some historical facts related to string makers:
The patron of string makers is Saint Erasmus, who was one of the first martyrs and was killed by pulling the intestines out of him
Salle, in the Abruzzi Italian region, is the hometown of all the Italian stringmakers (D’Addario, Galli, D’Orazio, Pirastro, Savarez...). Its patron is Beato Roberto from Salle, who was killed in the same way and was found singing odes to God accompanying himself with the sound of his intestines drying on a tree nearby, as they were harp strings.
Salle was at the center of the fights for Italian unification, in the second half of the 19th century. The people was exasperated by poverty and being under a central (and far) law, so many men and women turned themselves into robbers to fight the Italian soldiers. A common way to celebrate their triumph returning to the village was waving high the intestines of the soldiers they killed...
Tags
baroque music, double-bass strings, early music, gut strings, gut strings history, gut strings maintenance, gut strings manufacture, viol strings, viola da gamba strings, viola strings, violin strings, violoncello strings
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