Looking at all the discussion we've been having about gut strings - to load, or not to load, to wind or not to wind, to twist or not to twist . . . - one thing that hasn't come up for a while is how different modern gut seems to be from the old stuff.
When you look at old pictures showing gut being used to string a lute, or the loose ends of gut hanging from a pegbox, it's clear that it was much softer stuff than the wire-like gut we have today. For a start it came in hanks. Try tying modern gut in a hank and it would look like crap when you unravel it - kinked, cracked, opaque . . . I have no knowledge of the differences between the manufacturing process for modern gut and that used long ago, but it must have been quite different. What difference would stiffness make? One possible difference is inharmonicity - the tendency of harmonics to be sharper in stiffer strings. This is something that piano tuners have to allow for routinely - because of the stiff wire strings. That's just a guess, though, and we won't know for sure until somebody makes old-style soft gut and performs a comparison. I'd have thought this would be a fairly straightforward thing for gut makers to do. Maybe somebody has already done it? Bill -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
