Save Money and Overcome Moisture with Oil Soaking

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(Warning: don't do this with wound strings!) 

Concerned about the short life of your strings? 

Do your strings get hairy in minutes in the summer?

Your strings could last much longer, you need only some olive oil, and some time....

It may seem complicated, especially if you are always touring and you are never at home... but think for a while, if your strings could last three or four times as they last now, wouldn't your life be more simple? 

Wouldn't it be nice to save money, and have more reliable strings?

You already buy your strings in advance, I know, because when you don't you hardly get them in time from the factory. So it's just a matter of buying for one time one stock more. So you can soak them in the oil, for no less than one month, and you will have a couple of weeks to dry them before you put them in a nice tin can into your case.

Even if you travel a lot, you need to find the time or the place where you can buy your string, so you are already getting organized. But this way you will buy fewer strings and you only have to remind to take them out of the oil in time when you need replacements and to buy enough strings so that your oil jar is always full of strings.

It's one step more, but it will change so much: you will have a stock of reliable strings (especially if you also previously tested them with the Mersenne's test) and you won't suffer bad surprises opening the packages only when you need them :)

(Historically the strings were preserved in olive oil, in a pocket made with a pig bladder!)

4 easy steps

to have stronger and better sounding strings:

 

  1. soak them in (olive) oil
  2. wait
  3. take them out and dry them
  4. wait



Tags

baroque music, daniela gaidano home, double-bass strings, early music, gut strings, gut strings maintenance, viol strings, viola da gamba strings, viola strings, violin strings, violoncello strings


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