Vihuela Strings

The vihuela is the small, round-backed five-string instrument at the heart of a mariachi group — the one playing the driving rhythm underneath everything else. It is not a guitar and it does not take guitar strings. These are made for it.

Our vihuela sets were designed alongside Tomas Delgado of Candelas Guitars in Los Angeles, a shop that has been building and repairing these instruments for generations. The gauges are theirs as much as ours.

Clear or black

Clear nylon is brighter and more articulate, with more projection and sharper definition — the set for cutting through a full group. Black nylon is warmer, with a softer attack and a rounder tone, for players who want a more traditional, mellower sound. Both are otherwise identical, and both run the same gauges.

Gauges

Five strings, listed first to fifth. The gauges are not in ascending order because the vihuela is tuned re-entrantly — the middle strings sit higher in pitch than the outer ones, which is what produces its bright, percussive chord voicing.

How Vihuela compares to our other specialty sets

These are the only vihuela sets we make. We also work with Candelas Guitars on our bajo sexto and bajo quinto sets, which are the other half of a traditional group's rhythm section. For other nylon-strung instruments we make Classits classical guitar sets and ukulele sets.

Made in the USA.