Today, gut strings for your violin come one per packet: the diameter is guaranteed, faulty strings are rare, and replacements are often covered. The price may seem high, but it isn’t, not when you compare it to what a violinist in the orchestra of the Teatro Regio in Turin faced around 1790.

1. Strings were sold in bulk. They came in bundles of 30, all made with the same number of gut strands, packed together inside an oiled paper bag, not individually wrapped like today. As for length, they were commonly “due tirate”, “two knots,” as Dowland called the Italian “tirata” in English. “1 tirata” is the length of string good for the violin (60 cm), so “due tirate” came to around 125 cm, a length still used today; “3 tirate” = 180 cm, and “4 tirate” = 240 cm.

2. Many strings were simply false. Of those 30 strings, a certain number were defective, depending on the maker and the origin of the strings. When tested with the Mersenne method to check their vibration, they proved irregular. Even the “true” strings were often partly flawed, since precision mechanical grinding didn’t exist yet, everything was polished by hand. Small “hairs” on the surface were common, and the finish was rough rather than smooth like today.

3. Diameters varied widely. Some strings were too thick, others too thin. A first violin string, for example, was made from three whole lamb intestines, and the resulting diameters ranged between 64 and 73, with most falling between 66 and 71, a distribution that follows a classic bell curve. This happened because, even though the gut strands were pre-selected for pairing (three strands for a first violin string), some variation was unavoidable: gut is a natural material. Naturally, the violinists at the Regio didn’t worry about whether their first string came out thin or thick one day, that’s a concern that only exists today.

4. Manufacturing defects were common. Some of the 30 strings had flaws, grease spots, or sanding imperfections.

5. There were no refunds. No one replaced faulty or defective strings for you, however expensive they were, you simply paid for them.

6. Quality was never guaranteed. There was no quality assurance system: the string’s region of origin and the maker’s name or reputation were the closest thing to a guarantee — for instance, strings made by Ruffini in Naples, or by Priuli, known as “Romanin,” in Padua. Fraud was extremely common at the time. Paganini himself would send a trusted friend to the string-making workshop in Naples, asking him to keep a close watch even on the workers.

7. String lifespan is still debated. It depended on a great many variables. In 1923, Carl Flesch wrote that a soloist’s first violin string typically lasted a day, maybe two.

8. Strings were extremely expensive. Our violinist from the Teatro Regio orchestra in Turin, not the soloist, just one of the other players, spent an entire month’s salary on strings to last his violin a year. In fact, the cost of strings remained high for centuries, right up until recent times.

9. There was no reliable way to measure a string, either. A micrometer would have solved the problem, but it was a very expensive instrument found only in physics laboratories and universities. The violinist Louis Shor was the first to mention a cheaper alternative, the so-called “gauge,” in 1832: a rectangular metal plate with a narrow “V”-shaped notch, marked on either side, you slid the string in until it touched the point where the notch closed, then read the diameter off the markings. A truly affordable micrometer only came in 1848, invented by Jean Laurent Palmer, but it didn’t come into widespread use until after the 1920s.

So here’s the whole picture. You buy your 30 strings for the year, spending roughly a month’s salary. Out of those 30, about 10 turn out to be totally false, straight to the bin. Another 7 are a bit false, usable, but the sound will never be quite in tune. Some have grease spots and are no good either. What’s left, say, 15 strings that are true, clean, and hair-free, only gives you the diameter you actually want on 10 to 15% of them. The rest are either too thin or too thick.

That’s the whole picture: patience, money, and a fair amount of trust in your stringmaker.

Photo: Hand-polishing of dried gut strings on a frame, in an Italian workshop from the 1920s (Lanciano, central Italy).