Gut & Silk 900

1880-1946 performances

Up to the middle of the 20th century, the only available strings for guitar were plain gut for Trebles and wound on silk core for Basses. Their acoustical performance was quite different from that of modern synthetic strings. The salient characteristics were a marked tonal presence, and brightness typical of gut strings (certainly superior to plain nylon and in some respects closer to fluocarbon strings) while the silvered copper would basses, on the other hand, possessed an exquisitely vocal quality, i.e. not so bright as, and with less sustain than, modern wound on nylon strings and more fundamental heavy. The Treble tension’s profile is not so scaled (like in use in all of the modern guitar’s sets): it is just ligthly scaled, like the usual standard of that time. This set which is made with only one degree of tension, riproposes excatly a historical assembling, tipycal of the period of Llobet and Tàrrega by using only genuine gut strings for Trebles and silk’s core wound basses, as it was said by Pujol in the “Escuela Razonada de la Guitarra” of 1934.

Please note

The basses of this set are in real silk, which, being naturally produced by an insect, cannot be steadily regular in their gauge. As a consequence, it may happen that the bass strings at 12th fret may be flat or sharp to a certain extent. The limit accepted by us is of 8 cents more or less. Beyond this value, the string is considered non-compliant and it will be replaced.
Besides, we would like to remind that the degree of compensation introduced by the inclination of the bone of the bridge – which is calibrated to the modern strings with a core of Nylon- may not apply to strings with a core of natural silk.

Audio recordings

The sound of the Antonio de Torres- guitar strung with a Gut & Silk 900 set: Stefano Grondona plays three catalan folk songs by Miguel Llobet (1878-1938):

Example nr. 1 – El testament d’Amelia

Example nr. 2 – Cançò de Lladre

Example nr. 3 – La filla del Marxant