C'mon let's twist again...
We finally have our guts ready, well cleaned, softened, hardened, selected: we are ready to use the wheel and give some twisting!
...then we take our protostrings and we put them on the frame, where we give more twisting, we check the tension is fine, we constantly check they don’t dry too fast.
Uhm.... this IS tricky... the sulfuration...
For sure they did it till the 80s, in Italy... and when you ask why to a string maker the answer is always “to have the strings white and beautiful”
To sulfur the strings you have to bring all the frames in a special room, or sometimes a sort of pit, light some sulfur, and close it for a night. On the next day, give air and take the frames out.
I doubt all this was done only to obtain a whiter colour, what was the matter with yellow strings especially if you didn’t know you could have white? I also doubt it was to disinfect them, we are speaking about music, not surgery.
But the experiments I have seen did no result in consistent quality, results were always different, strings could be gummier, stiffer, weaker...
Furthermore, today it is avoided by the low to spread sulfur gas in the air (if you are a company, if you are a farmer you can, because you have to disinfect your cellars), and anyway it is not that healthy...
Looking forward to your comments below, chemists are very welcome!
Drying, polishing, packaging The strings dried and still on the frames were polished by hand, using horse hair, or equisetum, polish stone or powder, or, later, sandpaper. About horse hairs: equisetum is also called horse tail, so for a long time wi thought that when they say we polished with horse tail, they were referring to
Read MoreTags
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
Historical gut strings manufacturing: cleaning with the thimble The last cleaning passage of the fresh gut was made using a copper thimble, pressing hard the thumb on the index finger. They did this 3 times a day for almost one week, using chemicals, and standing behind big tables with a parapet to protect them… G.
Read MoreA video from Superquark , ed. 2013. Superquark is a popular tv show in Italy, about science, art, history. It shows the manufacture of gut strings. At 2.06 it’s me cleaning the guts with the copper thimble.
Read MoreSheep gut versus Beef gut: when, why and the differences The long time diatribe about strings: sheep gut versus beef gut: first video of serie of 3 discussing when, why, and the differences between the two. We are covering this because it will help us to analyze the changes of 20th century so that we can
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