Aquila Loaded Basses CD

"…there is another sort of strings, which they call Pistoy basses, which I conceive are none other than thick Venice-Catlins, which are commonly dyed, with a deep dark red colour.”

(Thomas Mace “Musick’s Monument” London 1676)

The appearing of wound strings caused, starting from the end of the 17th century, the definitive abandoning of the ancient manufacturing techniques of the traditional all-gut bass strings.

This explains why modern plain gut strings fail to produce an acceptable acoustical performance in the low registers, thus making it unavoidable to use wound strings for musical repertoires that actually pre-date their historical appearing; this, in turn, causes an obvious philological paradox as well as serious tone and balance problems between high and low registers, especially on Lutes.

Some considerations suggests the idea that gut bass strings were made densier: the loading of gut, a technological strategy that we believe employed by the old stringmakers in order to have the Lute bass strings much more performant.

The Aquila CD bass strings are smooth synthetic loaded strings characterized by a high, standardized specific weight, achieved by a loading extruding process with very thin metallic copper powder (No mercury or lead compounds are involved in the process).

 

These strings offer an excellent tuning stability: far better than any plain gut, synthetic or wound string available today.