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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 point. It has been difficult because it involves some production secrets which probably have not been shared before. They are not big secrets, but they need a bit of a technical explanation to become perfectly clear...
In this report, I finally explain why I never recommend smooth strings, and why I think there is always a better solution than that, even when you think you are an exception.
Ps: the responsibility of all the drawings is entirely on my shoulders, including the Merry Bunny dancing in the equisetum field.
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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
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
Read Morefrom Fomrhi Quarterly Bulletin I collected in two pdf files most of the articles appeared in the Fomrhi Quarterly Bulletin related to strings from 1990 up to 2018. I thought that you might appreciate them. If you do, please consider subscribing to them at the link below. It’s worth every pound (and it is really just
Read MoreBreaks are not unpredictable, they’re just one of the many things we have to learn how to avoid Short life of the string: unfortunately a common problem today. Let’s try to give it a definition so that we can understand when our strings are normally working, and we just have to accept there is a
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