Dear Qin Friends,

Happy Chinese New Year!

As the Year of the Ox begins, we would like to announce the exciting news that NAGA and its friends have been developing NAGA New Silk Strings, and the 2009 version has just been released.  

NAGA director Wang Fei will demonstrate the new silk strings and talk about the development process and the history of guqin strings during the NAGA guqin culture class on Sunday, February 15^th. Since space is limited, please register now at:

http://www.chineseculture.net/guqin/newsletters/09nagaevents/09qinstudy.htm

NAGA New Silk Strings

NAGA New Silk Strings are a new kind silk string. The sound quality is as good as that of silk strings made before and during the 1950s, such as those you hear on old recordings.

­      These strings are as smooth as the best professional metal-nylon strings. You can play them as long as you like and they will not cause any pain in your fingers.

­      The sound is the pure and clear sound of silk and there are no scratching noises from fingering, only the clean sound of the slides.

­      The strings are as loud as steel-nylon strings.

­      They are very long-lasting, strong, and stable, and can be easily be tuned to standard pitch without breaking.

­      Temperature stability is better than that of metal-nylon strings.

­      They are supplied with the yingtou (knots) neatly tied, so you do not have to tie them yourself.

We recommend these for NAGA supervised models (gq01071) and (gq03090) made by Golden Award winning qin maker Zhang Yuxin, and for qins made by Zeng Chengwei for NAGA, for which they were originally designed and tested.

New features for 2009

1.     The strings are pre-stretched on our qins for several weeks, so they are more stable and easier to mount and tune to standard pitches. Because silk strings usually stretch a lot, they normally need to be mounted, taken off and re-mounted 2-4 times in the first month. The 2009 strings only need to be mounted once.

      Note: because these strings have been pre-stretched, they look as if they have been used. This is not a fault.

2.     The 2009 strings sound more subtle and are smoother than the 2008 version.

For distribution and ordering information, please visit http://www.chineseculture.net/guqin/instruments/guqinlist.html.

Since our strings were initially produced mainly for a small circle of NAGA members, only a limited number of sets is produced each time. There is already a waiting list, so to avoid disappointment please order without delay.

North American Guqin Association

http://www.guqin.org