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Double Bass Sonores Gut Strings by Gerold Genssler

#61
Great playing Jeremy!

The Golden Spiral etc. combination wins hands down to my ears. You can really hear and feel everything that you're playing and the sound is big and full, like a bass!

With the other strings, while your playing is once again excellent, I thought the sound was nasal, not particularly "gut-like" and they don't project nearly as well.

$700? I think not!
 
#62
jeremy said it all for me...

When I first put the strings on, I felt like Gary Peacock on “Spiritual Unity” or Miroslav Vitous on “Now He Sings Now He Sobs”—sort of a compressed but highly-articulate and sustaining pizz sound,

that vintage peacock/vitous "spiritual sobs" sound is undeniable
for me. what strings would get close to that sound for $100 to $200?
 
#64
this thread has become the "jeremy allen sounds & plays like
a million bucks for way less than 8 bills" thread.

thanks for adding the smittels gig...it's great listening & more info for us to consider in our personal sound search, as fluctuating as
it is.

after those 3 gigs / comps...any mid-song, post set revelation that these particular strings feel & play the best?

when you can...i pm'd you a couple days ago. thank you.
 
#74
As a matter of fact, I still have the two sets he originally sent me. We had a brouhaha with the German post office when I tried to send them back (I made the mistake of insuring them for the value of their replacement cost, and he was going to have to pay hundreds of dollars in taxes to accept the package or something) and the strings were returned to me. So Gerold cut me a very generous price on the strings and I'm keeping them.

The TWINE set I will keep aside for now and use them on my old English bass which is being repaired. The CORAX set I've parted out, and the E and A seem to make a perfect match for plain gut on the D and G on this old Kay I've been thumping around on. Herr Genssler also told me about a new product he's offering which may interest some people:
"To inform you about my last invention: the ORIGINAL set consist of E and A string with gut inside and metal wound (clear sound and extrem long sustain) which can be combined with a plurality of different D/G strings as there are: plain gut, wrapped GD with plasics material, G plain-D roundwound, DG CORAX...So one can have the E and A to provide a basis for combining them with different GD depending on what stile there is to play. I think that is the most flexible solution I can offer. ORIGINAL is cheaper as CORAX, HELIX, TWINE but I don't give 2 years of guarantee for that."

I honestly don't know how the 2-year guarantee can work for him. The A of the CORAX set has already started unwinding and buzzing, and that's the kind of thing I would send a string back for. Sometimes I wonder if the difference in climate is not considered by our Continental friends; I traded a Eudoxa E and A to one of our TB members who lives in Switzerland (and works for Velvet Strings), and I told him beforehand that there was some typical unwinding on the A string. When he got the string, he was fairly shocked and said he'd never seen such a thing in all his years of playing every gut string imaginable, and that now he knew what people were talking about when they spoke of gut strings coming unwound and falling apart. The Midwest'll do that to some gut strings...

But I do wish Gerold the best in his enterprise, because he is making strings of a remarkably high quality. I'll continue to support him as much as I can.
 
#75
Jeremy Allen said:
I honestly don't know how the 2-year guarantee can work for him. The A of the CORAX set has already started unwinding and buzzing, and that's the kind of thing I would send a string back for. Sometimes I wonder if the difference in climate is not considered by our Continental friends; I traded a Eudoxa E and A to one of our TB members who lives in Switzerland (and works for Velvet Strings), and I told him beforehand that there was some typical unwinding on the A string. When he got the string, he was fairly shocked and said he'd never seen such a thing in all his years of playing every gut string imaginable, and that now he knew what people were talking about when they spoke of gut strings coming unwound and falling apart. The Midwest'll do that to some gut strings...
.
Click to expand...

You're absolutely right Jeremy, i have played all kinds of possible wound guts and the only time i saw damaged ones were either jurassic strings left to rot for decades or some separation of the winding from the gut but not like in your case.... weather really makes a big impact on gut i guess, way more than what i could think of.... now i know what some of you guys are talking about:D
I honestly cant speak about Gerold's strings as i have never tried them, i just know that he was the one that together with Stephan Schertler started to make strings here at Velvet, so, its obvious that he knows about string making... and the 1st Velvets were also made with gut so he has experience in that field. Gut is an extremely hard material to work with, i tried here on my free time to make some wound gut A and E strings for me and its really a hell of a job, i used very dry gut to avoid shrinking but still the hardest thing was to make a flat winding on the gut without slippery.... ok, enough going off topic..



Nuno
 
#78
I just got my set of DRAGO BASSOs (the Sonores orchestra string) with a long C. I'm going to install them in the next few days.

What amazed me when I opened the shipping box was how thin these strings are. I was expecting a C string about the thickness of my big toe, but these *seem* (I haven't measured them) no thicker than standard Evahs, and they may actually be thinner.

I can hardly wait to play them.
 
#79
Pete G said:
I just got my set of DRAGO BASSOs (the Sonores orchestra string) with a long C. I'm going to install them in the next few days.

What amazed me when I opened the shipping box was how thin these strings are. I was expecting a C string about the thickness of my big toe, but these *seem* (I haven't measured them) no thicker than standard Evahs, and they may actually be thinner.

I can hardly wait to play them.
Click to expand...

I would like to read your impressions on these strings, Pete.
Did you try them?

Regards,
François
 

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