David, I read this article, your "work in progress", and I can thank you for publishing it. Your experiences are very similar to mine..... I have 1 lute in synthetic strings, where the others are all in gut, and I love the gut sound as well. It is too hard to resort back to the synthetics. after experiencing all the good qualities of gut.
For me, all gut has been a 10-year experience, and I have also gone through many possible combinations of strings, and I agree, in that I favor the Pistoy over the Gimped string. Not that the Gimped is more metallic in sound, but the sustain in tone is clearer and warmer in the Pistoy, or all-gut string. I think that when one weaves a wire into the string, it loses some of its flexibility, and this increase in stiffness will make for a faster decay in sound. I also find that a strong octave string is essential, when dealing with the lower register on a baroque lute. In terms of tuning, I find that if I arrive 3 hours in advance in the concert hall, & if I merely take the instrument out of the case & allow it to equilibrate to that particular room, it settles in and the experience of tuning is much less of a problem, than if one had merely gotten there & started to tune & play. In fact I find it better to tune gut as compared to synthetics. The exception to that is in hot, humid conditions in the summer. It took "a lot of guts" for you to write this article! ed At 04:57 PM 1/29/2005 +0100, LGS-Europe wrote: >I've put my experiences of the past year and a half of playing on gut >strings in an article on my website. It's called 'Gut strings, a work in >progress' and is on my homepage: Http://home.planet.nl/~d.v.ooijen/david. > >David > > > > >***************************************** >David van Ooijen >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Http://home.planet.nl/~d.v.ooijen/ >***************************************** > > > > >To get on or off this list see list information at >http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html Edward Martin 2817 East 2nd Street Duluth, Minnesota 55812 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (218) 728-1202
