Aquila 82C Ambra 800 Classical Guitar Strings

Until the middle of the 20th century, guitar strings were made up exclusively of gut for the trebles, and wound strings on a silk core for the basses. The acoustic performance of this kind of setup was very different from that of the current sets. It was characterised by a marked timbre and brilliance of the most acute strings in gut (certainly superior to nylon and in some ways, for the treble, more similar to that of PVDF or carbon). Basses, on the other hand, had an exquisitely vocal quality, i.e. presenting a less bright and less persistent sonority than the current bass strings wound on a nylon core, and they were more focused on the fundamental frequencies.

The Aquila Ambra 800 classic guitar string set was born following these principles It has been specifically designed to best recreate the ‘sound’ of the 19th century, using modern synthetic materials.

This set (made in one degree of tension) reproduces exactly a typical 19th century string setup. It consists of gut-coloured supernylgut trebles, with a rectified surface exactly as it’s done on gut strings. These strings perfectly imitate the surface of a gut treble belonging to the guitarist Andrès Segovia. They also adopt diameters that represent an average of those we found during our research. Basses have a silver-plated copper winding over a special multifilament that we call ‘Rayon’; we looked for a specific balance between metal and core in order to achieve the same texture of sound found in the original silk-wound strings.