Genre with Viola da Gamba. The viol, viola da gamba, or informally gamba, is any one of a family of bowed, fretted and stringed instruments with hollow wooden bodies and pegboxes where the tension on the strings can be increased or decreased to adjust the pitch of each of the strings. Frets on the viol are usually made of gut, tied on the fingerboard around the instrument's neck, to enable the performer to stop the strings more cleanly. Frets improve consistency of intonation and lend the stopped notes a tone that better matches the open strings. Viols first appeared in Spain in the mid to late 15th century and were most popular in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Early ancestors include the Arabic rebab and the medieval European vielle, but later, more direct possible ancestors include the Venetian viole and the 15th-and 16th-century Spanish vihuela, a 6-course plucked instrument tuned like a lute that looked like but was quite distinct from the 4-course guitar. Although bass viols superficially resemble cellos, viols are different in numerous respects from instruments of the violin family: the viol family has flat rather than curved backs, sloped rather than rounded shoulders, c holes rather than f holes, and five to seven rather than four strings; some of the many additional differences are tuning strategy, the presence of frets, and underhand rather than overhand bow grip. All members of the viol family are played upright. All viol instruments are held between the legs like a modern cello, hence the Italian name viola da gamba was sometimes applied to the instruments of this family. This distinguishes the viol from the modern violin family, the viola da braccio. A player of the viol is commonly known as a gambist, violist, or violist da gamba. Violist shares the spelling, but not the pronunciation, of the word commonly used since the mid-20th century to refer to a player of the viola. It can therefore cause confusion if used in print where context does not clearly indicate that a viol player is meant, though it is entirely unproblematic, and common, in speech. Vihuelists began playing their flat-edged instruments with a bow in the second half of the 15th century. Within two or three decades, this led to the evolution of an entirely new and dedicated bowed string instrument that retained many of the features of the original plucked vihuela: a flat back, sharp waist-cuts, frets, thin ribs, and an identical tuning, hence its original name, vihuela de arco; arco is Spanish for bow.An influence in the playing posture has been credited to the example of Moorish rabab players. Stefano Pio argues that a re-examination of documents in the light of newly collected data indicates an origin different from the vihuela de arco from Aragon. According to Pio, the viol had its origins and evolved independently in Venice. Pio asserts that it is implausible that the vihuela de arco underwent such a rapid evolution by Italian instrument makers-not Venetian, nor Mantuan or Ferrarese-so that a ten-year span brought the birth and diffusion in Italy of a new family of instruments. These comprised instruments of different size, some as large as the famous violoni as big as a man' mentioned by Prospero Bernardino in 1493. Pio also notes that both in the manuscript of the early 15th-century music theorist Antonius de Leno and in the treatises of the Venetian Silvestro Ganassi dal Fontego and Giovanni Maria Lanfranco, the fifth string of the viola da gamba is uniquely called a bordone, although it is not actually a drone and is played the same as the other strings. Pio argues that this inconsistency is justifiable only assuming the invention, during the last part of the fifteenth century, of a larger instrument derived from the medieval violetta, to which were gradually added other strings to allow a greater extension to the low register that resulted from its increased size. The fifth string, already present in some specimens of these violette as a drone, was incorporated into the neck when they were expanded in size. This was then surpassed by a sixth string, named basso, which fixed the lower sound produced by the instrument. In Pio's view, the origin of the viola da gamba is tied to the evolution of the smaller the medieval violetta or vielle, that was originally fitted with a fifth string drone, where the name remained unchanged even though it ceased to perform this function.