I’ve finally settled on a string set. After contacting Pirastro for help, they recommended and sent me a promo combination of their Perpetual string line. I never would have thought of this combo since it combines three different version of Perpetuals, but it worked perfectly the moment they were installed. For those who are curious, the combo is thus:

Perpetual Solo A Medium

Perpetual Edition D Medium

Perpetual Edition G Medium

Perpetual Edition C Strong

The fact that the string length on my cello is so short means that a higher tension string will actually work just fine on this cello and the actual tension that it takes to bring it up to pitch will be lower than the average cello due to the short string length. I had been operating under the thought process that lower tension would be better for the cello and also better for the sound, and of course it’s probably true that for a bigger cello, lower tension might be a good idea. The set I have on now is by no means the highest tension set one could find, but the C string in particular is the highest tension C string I have found available, so it’s funny to me that I ended up going the opposite direction in some sense. This is not to say that the cello sounded bad with any of the previous string sets, but this one has the sound I was after, so it’s relief to have settled on something.

I had been struggling a bit over the past month or so to find the sound that the cello had when I first played it in Waltham. It’s kind of confusing when you start to feel dissatisfied with the sound and you can’t pinpoint any particular physical reason for the change. It made me question whether or not I was hearing things properly. Since the last post I’ve had two more open seams that have been glued up and I chalked most of my dissatisfaction up to those seams being open and just not knowing that they were, but I also spent a lot of time experimenting with different endpins and thinking about tailpieces and all the other fittings that affect sound. Last week I looked inside the cello and noticed the soundpost was tilted over very slightly and so I texted my luthier about it.

David and I had been planning to do a bunch of things to the cello this week to optimize the setup. I think this aggressive plan was just a response to my dissatisfaction with the sound and what we discovered was that the main cause of the sound issues was a sound post that had moved so much that it actually damaged itself. Not only did it lean over slightly, but it rotated about 45 degrees and all that pressure split the post very slightly on the edge. David made a new post and put everything back together with one other change.

I decided to scrap most of the other setup adjustments and equipment additions to the cello partly to eliminate variables and to pinpoint how a new post would affect the sound with everything else remaining the same. The one thing that I did decide to move forward with was the installation of Wittner Fine-Tune pegs. This was a decision that came about partly based on my experience with a loaner that I played last year that had geared pegs and I found it so much easier to tune. For those who don’t know, the Wittner pegs look exactly like a wood peg, but they have internal gearing (as seen below) with a ratio of 8:1 meaning that for every 8 rotations of the peg end, the spindle on which the string turns rotates once. This means that all fine-tuning can be done from the pegs without fear of slipping and without physical effort. I can now play and tune myself at the same time, which is not something cellists do very easily if at all. It also means that the instrument is going to remain much more stable with no chance of pegs randomly slipping due to weather/temperature changes. This will benefit the instrument and keep it safe from things like say, a sound post getting knocked out of position. Additionally, the after-length, the area between the bridge and the fine tuners, and a length which informs the kind of resonance the cello has, can also remain unchanged which means the instrument will be more predictable for me as a player and therefore easier to play. In the absence of finetune pegs, one will usually be adjusting the fine tuners on the tailpiece to tune the instrument and this will change the after length and therefore resonance of the instrument whereas adjusting from the pegbox does not.

Wittner Fine-Tune Peg

I have to say that I was quite nervous about installing something so high-tech and frankly plastic onto my cello since I generally prefer the aesthetic of wood, but I think it looks okay and more than that I think it will be functional. It is worth noting that this is not the only modern material or high-tech item on the cello. The Titanium endpin for example is something that requires modern tools to make and looks like it belongs on a parts shelf at Boeing. The strings are probably the most insane modern product and these ones seem to even use a varied thickness winding which I’ve never seen before. Pirastro said they had to completely retool in order to produce the Perpetual line, so there’s a little bit of hypocrisy in keeping the wood pegs for the purity of the instrument. Here’s a video from Austrian String Manufacturer Thomastik which shows some of the process behind modern string manufacturing.

I’m still not quite used to the Wittner pegs, but it has been less than 24 hours since I picked it up from the shop, so I couldn’t really be expected to, however I enjoyed using them for the first time yesterday and the cello sounds unreal now. Maybe it sounds better than it ever has. Now that my string search is over and the pegs are stabilized, I think this cello is going to enter a phase of stability and that will be good for it and will give me a really good sense of how the sound is developing without the chaos of environmental changes and excessive movement from tuning, travel, changing strings etc.

Lastly, with the warm spell we had this week, it became obvious just how much this cello likes warmer weather. Even with a messed up post, it sounded immediately better when the temperature rose above 50 degrees F. Not so with the old cello, which seemed not to move around much at all. I’m looking forward to spring