From historical process to modern, from sheep to cow.
In this video I forgot to mention the most important thing: the use of bovine guts permitted to avoid a big part of the process, saving days of work and dozens of workers, and, last but not least, working with a standardized material, always same size.
If today a company is using sheep and is using historical process, that means all the previous steps I mentioned, employing all that people (at least 20) to keep the timing (to prevent the guts to decompose), and making something like 500 Strings per week (which, today, are not enough to pay for 20 people)
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
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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
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
Read MoreHow 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!
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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