1 mins
At what price?
Professional strings for young players that won’t break the bank
FEATURED PRODUCT
‘Students don’t have the money to change good-quality strings regularly, so we wanted to make something that was of professional quality, but not expensive,’ says Pirastro’s technical director Adrian Müller. ‘I don’t want to hear high-level students playing on the same strings for one and a half years!’
Pirastro’s answer to this problem is its new Flexocor Deluxe cello strings, which fill the gap between the company’s cheap and high-end products. ‘Students need to learn what a professional string is and what materials to look for,’ says Müller. ‘What makes a professional string is good playability and sound. You need warm and round A and D strings, and powerful G and C strings. The Flexocor Deluxe have both, because we used tungsten and rope core for the G and C, and solid steel and chrome steel for the A and D. It’s difficult to make steel sound good, but the effort is worth it.’
The company also focused on creating a four-string set that worked well as a unit, because ‘students shouldn’t have to think about the strings, just about the music,’ says Müller.
‘Normally we look at one string at a time, but here we worked on all of them simultaneously, so they have similar characteristics.’ It is therefore more important than it is with other sets, Müller adds, to use all four Flexocor Deluxe strings together.
To make these strings Pirastro used some of the same construction techniques learnt from the pricier Perpetual range’s development phase, while keeping a focus on price and playability. The new set consequently comes at almost half the price of the Perpetual. Although the Flexocor Deluxe doesn’t have the full sound spectrum of Perpetual, Müller claims that blind tests between the two ranges revealed that 30 per cent of players prefer the cheaper Flexocor Deluxe. ‘Some players don’t need all the added elements and prefer its playability, which is easier than the Perpetual,’ he says. ‘It is a joy to see students smile when they play on these new strings.’
Pirastro Flexocor Deluxe cello strings set $170 email info@pirastro.comweb www.pirastro.com