subject: Dominant Violin Strings - Quality Sound without the Headache [print this page] Dominant Violin Strings - Quality Sound without the Headache
There are several choices with regards to buying violin strings. However, Dominant violin strings are the best choice, providing quality sound without the hassle, and here's why.
Sheep gut strings were used exclusively for hundreds of years before lower strings started to be wrapped in silver to provide greater mass. Gut strings possess a rich, warm sound and produce quality complex overtones. However, they also are vunerable to various changes in climate conditions and must be tuned often to pay for that fluctuations.
Eventually, the transition from gut to steel violin strings became the norm. Classical musicians, especially, consistently made the change to steel strings because they produced a crisper and more direct sound with fewer overtones. Steel strings also provide the benefit of being more stable in pitch and having greater durability. However, they had a definite metallic sound.
Then, within the 70's, synthetic core strings were introduced into the market by Thomastik-Infeld who created Dominant violin strings. These revolutionary violin strings contain nylon perlon cores which produce a more stable pitch than gut, but with the gut string's more desirable sound qualities.
Dominant violin strings not only provide full sound with vibrant overtones comparable to gut strings, but they also get rid of the scratchy metallic sounds of steel strings. Dominant strings are also quite affordable and hold their form well, two characteristics which will make them excellent selections for today's violinist, especially the beginner.
Dominant strings come in three gauges, soft, medium and stiff, which are generally mixed by professional violinists depending on the desired sound results. The down side to this to Dominant violin strings would be that the metallic wrapping round the synthetic core tends to unravel. The strings also require periodic changing to be able to keep up with the crisp sound.
After fitting your violin with new Dominant strings, it will take several days of playing before they settle into their rich sound and lose the crisp metallic edge they initially have when completely new.
All said and done, the violinist who uses Dominant violin strings has the benefit of producing rich, quality sound with no hassles of other types of strings.
