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Why sometimes do we have to wait for our order at the string maker?
Why he cannot just decide to make our 85?
Sometimes planning a gut production is really frustrating: the gauge of the string is not only determined from the number of strands, but also from their width and from the twisting. The second is on the string maker experience and sensibility (more twisted=bigger, but we cannot change twisting to obtain a gauge, it would strongly affect the response of the string), but the first is depending from the slaughter house and it is not easy to check...
At the slaughter house the beef gut is cut by a machine in strands similar to the dimension of lamb gut and sheep gut, so that the string maker can follow the sources deciding how many strands to use to obtain a gauge.
Then, it may happen that from a bunch of strings he will obtain a huge quantity of 97 but very little of the best sellers 88 and 85, and the only thing he can do is to plan another production, which will be ready only in two weeks...
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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
That’s me , or at least this is what I was in Aquila from 2002 up to 2016… On gauge imposed on a string by the polishing process… why half polished are definitely better and why the quality control and the polishing must be done by the same person. Want to know more? There’s a
Read MoreThe “fresh gut” part Let’s get started, and of course we start from Salle, in Abruzzi (Italy). We’ll go and see how a factory was organized in the 18th century. Yes, I said factory, not workshop. When you take out the intestine from a sheep, the first thing you need to do is to empty it someway.
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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