is then harvested, dried, sunned, processed into small sections, and ultimately machined into reeds. With the acquisition, Jim D’Addario implemented sustainable plantation practices in the company’s cane fields to develop digitally controlled diamond blades to make the final cut on the reeds. Orchestral In 1905, Ladislav Kaplan emigrated to the United States from Germany and opened a violin-making and repair shop in New York City. Kaplan soon moved the company to Connecticut, United States, where he began processing sheep gut for strings, eventually founding the Kaplan Musical String Company, makers of gut strings for harps and violin family instruments. In 1981, D’Addario acquired the Kaplan Music String Company, and Jim D’Addario and his team retooled, retrofitted, automated and computerized the original Kaplamatic string winding machine designed by Otto Kaplan in 1949. Jim and John D’Addario, Jr. were experts at manufacturing strings for fretted instruments, but making strings for bowed instruments required special expertise. They subsequently hired Dr. Norman Pickering, a prominent violist, luthier, and acoustic engineer, as a consultant to the bowed division. Pickering and Jim began researching and developing multifilament twisted-steel core violin strings. D’Addario also began processing its own wires for bowed strings, introducing Prelude solid steel core strings in 1984. The next challenge D’Addario had to overcome was to develop a way to manufacture commercially available twisted steel cables. Suppliers at the time couldn’t produce spring-tempered high-carbon steel cables on machines meant to manufacture stranded copper wires for electrical conduction. The D’Addario team developed their own machines to manufacture their own stranded-wire cables for violin and viola strings and following ten years of research and development, D’Addario introduced Helicore in 1994. In 2017, D’Addario introduced Ascenté, a new synthetic core violin set designed for a wider tonal range and a more sophisticated palette of increased pitch stability, as well as to provide longevity and durability. Notable D’Addario String Artists Billy Strings Yvette Young Chris Thile Brandi Carlile Kacey Musgraves Marty Schwartz Chris Stapleton Gary Clark Jr. Joe Satriani Kaki King Molly Tuttle John McLaughlin Mike Dawes Nile Rodgers Pat Metheny Vince Gill Corporate social responsibility D'Addario Foundation In 1979, Jim and John D’Addario, Jr. working in conjunction with Jim’s wife Janet D’Addario, established the D’Addario Foundation. D’Addario had created professional-quality classical guitar strings, but the company wanted to reach out to new artists who were struggling to make a living. The Foundation’s first iterations were born from