Dear All,
As a long-time enthusiast for gut strings I'm beginning to realise that my attitude may be rather different from most other luteplayers, whether they use gut or synthetics.
I started with gut (c.1980) because I couldn't stand the sound of wirewound strings (I still can't). It has been a considerable disappointment over the years that many makers of gut strings have given the impression that their strings are like historical ones just because they're made from the same material: I think it's pretty clear that the raw material is probably much the same (collagen, after all - so all the questions about the age of lambs, whether they're castrated or not etc is probably irrelevant), but equally clear that we know precious little about how strings were made, and the details of the manufacture are incredibly important.
So I love my Sofracob strings (alas, hardly any left), machined to absolute cylindrical perfection, absolutely true, and probably nothing like a historical gut string! I'm really interested in what historical strings were like, but also very interested in any substitutes which might have similar positive properties (complexity of sound, for instance) without some of the negatives (top of the list being falseness). When I play on gut strings, I'm not making any claim that my strings are like historical ones, but I feel the sound is at least closer to what might have been heard in the past than the "wirewound" sound.
Martin To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
