Thirty years ago, when John Pearse began to develop his unique string-making technology, the making of violin strings was pretty much of a hit and miss affair. To this day, he remembers toiling over long, wooden troughs of evil-smelling sheep intestines, the temperature up around ninety Farenheit, "combing" and "waulking" the fibers to prepare them for the stretching and twisting that would transform the unlikely looking stew into top-quality strings for the violin and viola. With all the care in the world, however, the discard rate for unacceptable strings was almost twenty percent. The waulking solution would be too acid, making the string brittle, or the lipid level was too high, causing the finished string to not hold a satisfactory torque.

In the intervening years, many manufacturers, John Pearse included, switched to Perlon for a core material because of the relative ease of working it--and its reliability. Good though Perlon is, however, it does not have the majesty of projection that one associates with the older gut strings. The thing that made gut strings so special was the fibroid construction that allowed the string to accept--and retain--a strong torque, giving it great projection, and an immediate response. There had, he reasoned, to be a way to manufacture a material that would have the same properties when placed under similar torque.