Gut strings: high maintenance vs nylon (and fluorocarbon)?

[Biagio]

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, LOL: any nylon strung harp can be restrung with gut in all or most of the range if they are sized appropriately. The Boulevard is a straight up pedal stringing. The other Dustys you will notice are not (pedal here, lever gut there, an E substitutes for a D etc.). Not a big deal if you prefer gut and don’t mind the expense.

Biagio

[balfour-knight]

Thanks, Mae and Biagio! I sure hope that Dusty Strings brings some gut-strung harps to Asheville for the Southeastern Harp Weekend. I would love to compare gut and nylon on their beautiful harps!

[Saul Davis Zlatkovski]

I want to give Bow Brand some praise, because over the last few years, their Bow Brand gut strings have been lasting like crazy, without even fraying. They are performing as well as my Pirastro nylon strings, which, sad to say, are not performing as well as they used to. I have had to practice on harps with flourocarbon strings for a week or two, and I will never do so again. They caused me injury that took as long to recover from. If cost is your concern, use nylon strings. If you prefer the sound or feel of gut, use them. But I don’t recommend the other to anyone. Their tone quality is not particularly appealing. If we need have another synthetic, keep searching.

[balfour-knight]

Saul, I agree about how good the Bow Brand gut strings have been over the last few years. Also, their Burgundy gut is a cheaper option which I sometimes use, and to me, they are just as good. Some harpists think that they do not look quite as nice, since they are advertised as “having slight visual imperfections.” I have never found that to be a problem.

However, I would never advise anyone to restring a pedal harp with nylon in the 4th or 5th octaves. We encountered a Salvi strung with nylon recently, from the top of the harp all the way down to the wire strings. It felt like (and sounded like) it was strung with rubber bands! Go the extra expense for gut–it is worth it! From my experience, the top octave is the best one to string in nylon, then possibly the second octave, and MAYBE the third, although I would not do any except the top octave in nylon. This is exactly what Lyon & Healy recommends, by the way.

Best wishes,
Balfour

[balfour-knight]

Update to this “old” thread, ha, ha! At the Southeastern Harp Weekend in Asheville, NC, Dusty Strings did bring some gut-strung harps. They were very nice, as many have said, but the nylon-strung ones are still my favorite, even though I love gut on my pedal harp. To each his/her own, I always say!

Best wishes to everyone,
Balfour

[duckspeaks]

I am sort of sceptical over the Boulevard. The vibrating length can’t be the same as a large harp from the shorter body. If they use identical strings, does that mean they are forced to lower the tension? It appears they are shorter in stature and thus we have to have shorter vibrating lengths.

Any thoughts and actual comparison?

I believe it is of a very similar size t other 34 stringed models like Ravena or the Crescendo. Would it be representative if the sound and pkaying characteristics of a larger harp? Say if we measure the effective vibrating length of C3, C4 and C5 will they match a large harp?

[Tacye]

Shorter harps do of course have shorter sounding lengths on many strings (and very useful it is too when I can take a broken string off my pedal harp and retie it for a lever harp when I am feeling stingy or short on spares). There is of course a difference in sound and playing characteristics between different types of harp, but I would expect a high tension gut strung small harp to be closer in playing technique to a high tension large gut strung harp than a low tension nylon strung harp is to either.

Specifically, when I sat down at the Boulevard and asked it how it wanted to be played it responded fine to a technique that is pretty much what I usually use on a modern pedal harp.

[duckspeaks]

Dear Tacye,

Thank you for your reply.

Cheers

[Gretchen Cover]

Saul, you must have lucky Bow Brand gut strings. They have been problem strings for every other harpist for the past three years. There is a thread about this.

I just restrung the first 20 strings of my Iris with Bow Brand and within a week, 6 broke. Meanwhile, the lower octave Bow Brand strings have been on back order for more than a month which is why my harp was only half re- strung. When the 2nd octave F randomly broke on my other recently restrung harp (and the same string broke during communion at a wedding Oct. 17), I just about went insane.

Serendipitously, I received an email from Virginia Harp Center about their new Premiere strings. I immediately ordered a set and made arrangements to get rid of all my Bow Brand strings. The new Premiere strings made by Camac for the US market are like the old Vanderbilt gut. The sound is clear and full. My harp sounds better than it ever has, and these strings are easier to play, too.

[Seiken]

Hi I’m searching fluorocarbon and get into this thread. I have discussed with a local guitar maker and he told that many classical guitarist like fluorocarbon strings more in the last 3 strings, or even the 3rd string.

Since harps is such exactly designed in tension and strength, maybe I could not switching strings safely without plan like what people did in guitars and ukuleles. Now I’m interesting in switching my nylon wrapped strings with fluorocarbon ones(since the wrapped strings have lower tensile in same linear density) but I don’t know how to calculate linear density of wrapped strings. Like this:

Core nylon 0.045″
Wrap nylon 0.01″

With this data, are strings from any manufacturer goes with same linear density? Is it possible to calculate the linear density from this, or I have to disassemble the strings to determine it with my microbalance?

[Biagio]

You could calculate that manually Seiken. However it might serve you better to download this free Excel string analysis spreadsheet from Music Makers:

http://www.harpkit.com/blog/string-analysis/

It uses imperial units mostly alas but you can’t have everything (grin). It’s quite accurate and covers most string types other than more unusual ones such as gold, sterling silver yellow and red brass. I get around that limitation but substituting but unless you make wire strung harps you needn’t deal with that anyway.

You will of course need the vibrating length and pitch of the note in question. Incidentally Savarez Alliance fluorocarbon strings are in metric units; for instance HPK091 means 0.91mm. You can use Japanese fluorocarbon fishing line, believe it or not, and I have done so; but that is a real pain to calculate and hard to find at reasonable lengths.

Gut is slightly less dense than fluorocarbon but close enough that you could use that. Getting a gut string maker or seller to tell you the diameter is another issue however. Harp gut strings are sold by the pedal harp note name and numbering scheme, which is unhelpful unless you have a conversion chart.

Best wishes,
Biagio

[Saul Davis Zlatkovski]

I have a stock of strings, so I only recently got into the ones that were breaking on high-humidity days. I save any strings that are not false, so I could replace them. Hopefully, I won’t have that problem on my pedal harp, but I have lost track of when I bought them so I can’t probably ask for replacements.
I listened to a harpist playing on Savarez strings recently and I finally figured out the main difference with their sound: they do not ring as long as other strings, I am pretty sure.They sound rather pleasant, somewhere between nylon and gut, but I do not want strings that ring less. If you are after what some call a “clean” sound, then they’re for you. For me, harps are for ringing. That’s what makes them a harp.
I will say, though, it seems like Pirastro has switched to tynex nylon, because their strings are not of the quality I was used to anymore. They’re not holding pitch as well, and not lasting as long. It’s very disappointing. And they are not responsive to customers.
Oh for the days of nice, fat strings with rich, warm tone. At least my harp is rich enough in tone that any string sounds good. But I have tried gut in the third octave, and it’s like putting a mute on the harp.

[Gretchen Cover]

Saul, the recent years of Bow Brand strings break. Period. Doesn’t matter about humidity, etc. etc. I can only hope they resolve the problems because there are so few harp string manufacturers – I had hoped so until my recent set of strings kept breaking. But, let’s move on. The Premiere strings have a fantastic sound. Very full, resonant and clear. My guitar partner was astounded by the sound difference quality when we rehearsed this week. I’ve now had a set on a whole week and no breakage. It took that long for them to fully settle in. I love the feel and the sound. Try them and you will get your nice fat strings with warm tone. PS/ I wiped my off a few times with a microfiber cloth after stringing because the string coating initially felt a bit tacky.

[emma-graham]

You might be interested in this. It was posted by a harp dealer here in the UK on Facebook in October. It’s looking like Bow Brand’s problems are not yet under control.

http://i1126.photobucket.com/albums/l614/goldenharp1/742DF625-24D2-4A3C-9CE0-62CD6DB160C1_zpsauca3s7k.png

[Seiken]

Thank you Biagio, the spreadsheet is exactly what I need. Now I’m using it to design a new string set, since the default strings cannot get easily here.

I also tried some Japanese fish lines, fc and nylon. They are really better than my default harp strings and some guitar strings. The problem is their gauges are not always same as in label and I have to measure it to sure what it is when I get a new roll.

[Author]

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