String choice: Why do harpists still prefer gut?

There are three materials commonly used for non-metallic musical strings: nylon, fluorocarbon and natural gut. Classical guitarists have, almost universally, switched from gut to nylon or fluorocarbon, but many harpists still prefer gut. A design chart for string choice will be presented, and versio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2021-04, Vol.149 (4), p.A97-A97
Main Authors: Woodhouse, Jim, Lynch-Aird, Nicolas
Format: Article
Language:English
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:There are three materials commonly used for non-metallic musical strings: nylon, fluorocarbon and natural gut. Classical guitarists have, almost universally, switched from gut to nylon or fluorocarbon, but many harpists still prefer gut. A design chart for string choice will be presented, and versions of it will be shown for the three materials. These will be used to demonstrate that harpists make a choice of gauges and tensions that contrasts dramatically with the practice of guitarists. This leads them to be interested in a different corner of the design chart, where gut indeed has an advantage over nylon in terms of the internal damping behaviour of bass strings. It will then be suggested that this advantage could be eliminated by the use of fluorocarbon strings, with appropriate gauges, in the lower register of plain strings (without over-winding).
ISSN:0001-4966
1520-8524
DOI:10.1121/10.0004631