History of the Savarez Selector

What it was

In the late 1990s Savarez — the string maker founded by the Savaresse family in 1770 (in Paris or in Lyon, depending on the source) and based today in Caluire-et-Cuire, next to Lyon — built a program for choosing strings: the Savarez Selector [10]. It was not a conventional application but a Microsoft Excel workbook, selectorconve.xls, with fifty worksheets, about twenty Visual Basic modules and Excel 5 dialog boxes. Its macros are dated between 10 October and 14 November 1998 and signed “DT”.

Savarez’s own early-music catalogue described it as “un programme informatique de calcul de calibres, de tensions de cordes… Ce logiciel appelé Savarez Selector, propre à Savarez, vous permet de résoudre un certain nombre de problèmes concernant les cordes tels que le calcul d’une tension, la recherche d’un calibre d’une corde existante ou d’une longueur vibrante”, and stated the medium: “disponible sur le CD ROM Savarez Selector que vous pouvez utiliser sous Windows 95-98 ou à partir du logiciel Excel 7.0 ou 97 ou même 2000” [1].

From three inputs — frequency, vibrating length and tension — the Selector computed the theoretical diameter of a plain string in fluorocarbon (KF Alliance), nylon or gut and looked up the catalogue references; for wound strings it worked with linear weight (PUL) and its five families; and it carried templates for thirty-one instruments, from the classical guitar to the concert harp, with their tunings. All of it in a language “somewhere between French and English”, as a luthier remembered years later on the Delcamp forum [2].

How it was distributed and how it vanished

Savarez shipped it on the “Savarez Selector” CD-ROM and, for a while, it could be downloaded from savarez.fr as Selectorconve.zip. In March 2014 the luthier Trevor Gore told the story on Delcamp: “Once upon a time, on that thing that Savarez calls a website, you could download a zipped Excel spreadsheet called ‘Selectorconve.zip’. This is a spreadsheet with a lot of macros that is supposed to help you design/choose string sets…”; and he added that it was no longer available: “they ask you to contact them and they will send you a copy” [2].

The community missed it because Savarez’s website did not publish complete tensions. In February 2010 a thread on the same forum found no tension data for the 540R set; three weeks later a member supplied figures “taken from an Excel spreadsheet that was distributed here some time ago” [3]. Another obtained them by writing to Savarez: “I sent an e-mail to Savarez and they sent me back a spreadsheet” (June 2010) [4], and the same figures resurfaced in 2011 in a user-compiled tension list [5]. It was in those threads that the Selector’s most opaque unit was deciphered: “P U L stands for Poids Unit Lineique; weight per unit length… Savarez use two units of length, centimeters for string length and % mm for string diameter” [2].

Today the file is no longer distributed. We searched the Internet Archive for its trace: there is no capture of the zip nor of the page that offered it between 1998 and 2006 (savarez.fr was only crawled from late 2002, and the 1998 savarez.com domain belonged to the US distributor) [10]. The program’s existence is therefore documented by the workbook itself and by Savarez’s catalogue, not by an archived copy of the download.

Why it no longer runs

The Selector was built on two techniques Excel later abandoned: the Excel 5/95 “dialog sheets”, replaced by Visual Basic UserForms, and previous-generation macros, which modern versions block by default for security reasons [6]. The workbook opens, but its 1998 interface does not appear and its routines do not run. That is why this site does not offer the file: it documents it and replicates it.

The Selector among its contemporaries

It was not the only string calculator of its time. Arto Wikla published his String Calculator in Helsinki in 1996 (version 2.0 in May 1997) [7]; Northern Renaissance Instruments handed out gut gauge tables on request [8]; and years later Lauri Niskanen wrote the calculator behind today’s Cuerdas Pulsadas String Calculator [9]. What set the Selector apart is that it was not a generic tool: it encoded Savarez’s 1998–2000 catalogue — references, gauges and linear weights — and Savarez’s own way of calculating, with coefficients explained in the concepts page.

How it was recovered

This site starts from a copy of the CD-ROM kept by Cuerdas Pulsadas. The catalogues, tunings and formulas were extracted from the file programmatically and verified against cells that Excel itself computed at the time (see the methodology). The original file and its code are not published; what is published are its data and its rules, reconstructed and checked.

Sources

1. Savarez, Cordes pour Instruments Anciens (catalogue PDF, CD-era content, hosted on savarez.fr): https://www.savarez.fr/sites/default/files/public/produit/plaquette/catalogue_instruments_anciens.pdf
2. Delcamp Classical Guitar Forum, “Calculating string tension using PUL (Savarez)”, March 2014 (Trevor Gore’s posts of 4 and 8 March): https://www.classicalguitardelcamp.com/viewtopic.php?t=84911
3. Delcamp, “Tension of Savarez strings”, February–March 2010: https://www.classicalguitardelcamp.com/viewtopic.php?t=48157
4. Delcamp, “Individual tensions of the Savarez high-tension basses?”, June 2010: https://www.classicalguitardelcamp.com/viewtopic.php?t=47004
5. Delcamp, “String Tension List”, July 2011: https://www.classicalguitardelcamp.com/viewtopic.php?t=60555
6. Microsoft Q&A, “What Excel 4.0 or 5.0 macro commands have been replaced?”: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5682053/what-excel-4-0-or-5-0-macro-commands-have-been-rep and Microsoft Tech Community, “Excel 5.0 Dialog Sheets”: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/excelgeneral/excel-5-0-dialog-sheets/2052994
7. Arto Wikla, String Calculator (1996–1997): https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/wikla/mus/Calcs/wwwscalc.html
8. Northern Renaissance Instruments, Guide to NRI Information and Prices: http://www.nrinstruments.uwclub.net/Guide.html
9. Lauri Niskanen, Lute String Calculator: https://niskanenlutes.com/index.php?p=stringcalc
10. Savarez, L’histoire Savarez: https://www.savarez.fr/content/lhistoire-savarez; Internet Archive captures of savarez.fr (2002–2006): https://web.archive.org/web/2002*/savarez.fr