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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
Scarnatura: the first thing to do at the factory In this videos, originally Facebook Live, I went to the butcher to buy some lamb row intestines to show you the first part of the cleaning. This should never be done in a river directly, because the clod water will result in a stiffer gut. Normally
Read MoreFrom 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
Read MoreC’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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