It needs to be understood, i think, that there are clearly two elements in the pitch (in)stability. The string material and design is, of course one. But for the light and breathing, as it is, lute, the movement of the whole structure, most likely influences the tuning much, much more. So, in this case, chasing the string mole while disregarding the body movement monster, is not going to solve anything. Especially with the synthetics, - the differences observed here are the result of a different stretch - flexibility of the materials, rather then some radical reaction from the material to the temperature - humidity change. (Of course the wound strings, consisting of two conflicting materials are a problem of its' own). Just one brief look at the size of a single string and comparing it with the size of the whole instrument should make one to realize something here, right? I do not have an information on the early lutes in this regard, but early - baroque - bowed instruments as well as some later violins, especially those built and used in bad climes, had the inner wood surfaces treated with the mixture of hide glue and linseed oil. (There were actually some arguing this might have improved the instrument sound - to some tastes, that is, just off the top of my head - look up Frederick Castle's "Violin tone peculiarities"). Some other varnishes on the inner wood surface were observed as well. I have seen them on museum instruments. And some varnishes penetrated the wood deeply enough to create more wood stability. Think Cremona here. Protecting the inner wood surface of the lute would do much more to stabilize its' tuning in the case of rapid weather changes. But this will never happen, i would hazard to guess. Chasing a perfect string - there is the solution, of course.
alexander r. On Sat, 06 Oct 2012 12:17:41 +1000 Mark Probert <[email protected]> wrote: > > My $0.02, living in Sydney Australia, is that nylgut mitigates some > of he effect of fairly extreme weather changes. We can have a thunder > storm roll in and have the temperature drop by 10+C in the space of as > many minutes. Gut just gives up in those circumstances. > > Part B of this is the effect of the weather on the wood of the > instrument. One of my lutes is more stable than the other in the > pegbox department. When we are in a changing time, I am forced not to > play this instrument for days at a time (I really don't enjoy the tune, > tune, tune aspect). > > Then, isn't there the old adage of lute players spending half their > time tuning and the other half playing out of tune? This is not a new > problem, though I do believe that synthetics help. > > Kind regards > > -- > mark. > > > > To get on or off this list see list information at > http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
