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viola strings?

Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2021 1:22 pm
by Heraclitus Akimbo
Is there anything cool/inneresting I can do with a set of viola strings?

With holiday time and some extra elbow room, I've been banging away on the guitar over the past week. Maybe unsurprisingly, after not having played the Starcaster for over a year I managed to break a string almost immediately. Didn't want to go to a guitar store at this time of year/wave of the pandemic, so just ordered a few sets online.

When they arrived, mostly everything was fine, but for whatever reason the order picker messed up and I ended up with a set of viola strings! The are "light tension", 16"-17" scale, stranded string core, although the outside of the package doesn't list the string sizes for some reason.

It's almost certainly not worth the effort to try and send these back and get them replaced, so: is there anything fun I could do with them? They're too short to put on a guitar (and that'd be ill-advised anyway, I presume).

Important note: this is *not* the first step on the path to me getting a viola.

Re: viola strings?

Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2021 2:04 pm
by MechaGodzilla
tie two together, you get a guitar string!

Re: viola strings?

Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2021 7:09 pm
by moid
Got any planks of wood? Drill a hole at each end (or 16" apart), Stick a bolt through each hole and attach two nuts to each bolt. Sandwich/wind the string between each pair of nuts and then raise or lower the pairs of nuts to whatever height is required so that when you pluck the string it doesn't slap into the plank. Add more holes / bolts / nuts to give yourself more notes. Alternatively, make a short scale diddley bow?