|
Ramon Amira -> RE: Bargain Priced Strings (Aug. 4 2010 20:56:01)
|
quote:
Do they happen to sell strings by the YARD by any chance?.
Don't laugh Ron. In the old days in Andalusia, flamenco guitarists – who never had any money – would get fishing line, yards at a time, and just cut off what they needed for treble strings. It's the same composition – Nylon monofilament. Dupont made it in the late thirties for fishing wire. Then in the forties, Vladimir Bobri, an old friend of mine from the original New York Society of the Classic Guitar, who was a close friend of Segovia, introduced him to Albert Augustine, a luthier, who also had experimented a bit with making strings. Segovia pleaded with Augustine to help develop a synthetic string, because the gut strings then in use would never stay in tune, and would break a lot. Good strings were also hard to get at the time because of the war. Augustine went to Dupont, and the company eventually agreed to supply the material to make the strings if Augustine would do the actual manufacturing. After a lot of experimenting, he developed the first nylon classical guitar strings. Out of gratitude to Augustine, Segovia agreed to allow Augustine to put Segovia's photo and endorsement on every package of Augustine strings, where it remains to this day. I was very friendly with Augustine's widow Rose, who was also a member of the Society, and spent many a pleasant day chatting with her, and meandering around the Augustine factory in New York, watching the strings being made. Rose gave me tons of strings, and for years I never had to buy any.
|
|
|
|
