Pirastro Oliv Violin 4/4 KGL medium

I can't fault these strings and now have a full set on my violin which adds greatly to the pleasure of playing it. The set comes in a tube and I was not impressed that the individual strings are not clearly marked as to identity i.e which was the E, the A, and particularly, the D and G strings. It was no problem to identify the E and A strings but the other two were very similar; I took out my vernier calipers and proceeded to install the (very slightly thinner) D string (as I thought): it snapped before coming up to pitch. It took me a while to realise that I had installed the G string in the wrong place (the 'G' string wouldn't come up to pitch). Why these cannot be clearly flagged is a mystery to me. They are expensive enough not to have to run the risk of busting one of them straight off because of the lack of some form of identification. Grrrr.....

These are gut strings and therefore hard to keep in tune. This doesn't suit me, I find it frustrating. I have probably been spoiled by use of very reliable synthetic strings for many years. The strings give a sweet tone but it almost sounds muted on my violin and again another player might like this but I don't. The E string also whistles a lot in my opinion and I'm not a good enough player to compensate. These are probably a great string if you're a brilliant player and for baroque music but not if you're moving between different levels of heat/cold and humidity with your instrument. I'm moving straight back to synthetics!