Baroque Bows...

[Katie Long]

From various conversations and lots of playing the great string out there seems to be the gamuts. I know that Pete, my teacher, uses Dglugolecki strings (probably spelt wrong, sorry, but what a crazy name!) and I have one of his old A strings on my baroque bass which certainly sounds very good indeed.

I tend to go for top two plain gut and then bottom two wound, silver on gut. There are camps that prefer copper on gut but for me they just don't hold the tuning as well as the silvers. Sometimes you get silver and copper wraps but again I'm not so much of a fan. The most important thing for me visavis guts is that the top two are WOUND gut rather than just plain (as I used to have, I think they were old pirastros) because it is vastly easier to centre the tuning and find much more centre to the sound with wound strings, for me they just work better. A friend in Europe is trying out the Aquila strings but he hasn't had them very long; I'd like to get some gamuts in the long run as they make them for you and your bass but I'm still in the process of having the actual conversion done and strings are something to think about properly later...I have a set of strings that Pete rather generously gave me to keep me going for now which are a mixture of brands etc, but when the bass is ready I'll be phoning Mr Gamut.

I've attached a pic of the bow. Obviously when the hair is tightened the stick bends the other way to modern bows but this one was taken by my non-bass-playing father when it was first delivered to us. I'll get some proper pictures soon. It's a really lovely bow.