Occasionally we receive questions regarding our use of animal products and how they relate to broader environmental impacts.
For some clarification, Gamut Music uses the intestinal lining (serosa) of beef and sheep to manufacture music strings in the historical tradition as they have been made since at least the 1600s (you can find a detailed description of this process here).
In 400 years of string-making, there have not been a lot of changes in the processing and manufacturing of gut strings — aside from the discontinuation of some very toxic chemicals in the bleaching and curing process.
Our serosa is sourced from ethical livestock companies in Ireland and New Zealand, and is a byproduct of the beef and sheep meat industry. Traditionally, this material has been used for music strings, tennis rackets, regulator clocks, medical sutures, and meat snack casings (think beef sticks).
The more recent innovation of industrial farming has certainly led to deforestation (see the country of Brazil for modern, unfortunate examples), but the extremely small quantity of beef and sheep gut that Gamut Music uses on an annual basis can be measured in hundreds of pounds, not tons. (For reference, the global beef industry produces over 130,000,000,000 pounds of meat each year.)
Given the option, we would definitely prefer to use serosa from grazing animals, versus feed lot animals, as the quality of material is not only better for the rumen (stomach) microbiome due to diet, free range grazing is just better for the animals as a whole. But, as we don't own, raise, or slaughter animals, we are limited to the byproducts available to us from trusted abattoirs in the global marketplace.
While our use of gut material is comparatively limited, we do share concerns regarding the effects on the environment, and strive to be good stewards and reduce our impact as much as possible.
There have been experiments with non-synthetic (natural) string materials through history, but most have proven to be less suitable alternatives to the desired characteristics of gut in terms of sustain, playability, and resilience; and making strings out of sugarcane or palm, for example, leads to the same large-scale deforestation, erosion, water pollution, and biodiversity loss issues associated with the global livestock industry.
Inquiries have been made in regard to using materials like poleyther ether ketone (PEEK) as a substitute string material, and many modern string companies have developed their own proprietary synthetic materials in a ceaseless endeavor to replicate the "real gut sound" with varying results, but at the end of the day, creating more thermoplastic polymers in the world versus using an existing animal byproduct doesn't seem to be as straightforward of a tradeoff.
And while many of those companies have found success with synthetic strings, Gamut Music specializes in historically accurate materials for historic instruments and historically informed performance practice — meaning if a player is performing music from the 1750s and has a violin from the year 1750, they would prefer to play with strings that were designed specifically for that very old instrument, which are gut strings.
So, while we will continue making historical gut strings for the early music community, we make every effort to avoid the use of single-use plastics, chemicals, and practices that are harmful to the environment.