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
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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
Here is the video from the famous BBC serie “How it’s made” , recorded in April 2012 in Caldogno (Vicenza, Italy) at the Aquila strings factory. We tried to prepare everything to show them the whole process, but they didn’t want to film the smelly initial part. I’m the one who plays and who scrapes the guts
Read MoreGood 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
Read MoreWhat 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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