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
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!
Read MoreWhen 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 MoreWhy if you work in difficult climate conditions it is fundamental that you use strings from only one company and you don’t do fancy mix up… Every strings tends togo back to its past conditions, so as every string maker twist them and stretches them differently, it’s really complicate to deal with strings from different
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