This topic is very interesting and is the cause of many misunderstandings regarding the lute's tension. I still struggle to find the right tension to the first course of my instrument...
Most lutenists still come from the guitar, which is a very tense instrument. For years I played on a heavily strung lute (fortunately no damage) without being aware of it! In fact it took some time to relax my playing and start sounding two strings at once, something hard to do for people used to play with nails on single tense strings. It would be very nice to know from the top players what kind of string configuration they have: overall tension, gut x synthetics, etc... If anybody can add anything to this topic, please raise your voice! It will be appreciated. All the best. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
