>> vibrate in front of the monitor. Pluck, pull, strike >> or otherwise >> make the string vibrate. Anyone able to get it to >> vibrate in a >> parallel plane to the soundboard?
Stay with it, we just agreed that it's the initial direction of plucking that does influence the attack of the sound. The best theory was to set the bridge in motion. After that intial pluck the vibration is like you can see in front of your TV (love that experiment especially with theorbo basses, beats watching tv itself). To quote the study in guitar acoustics that Charles brought to our attention (page 17): "When the string is plucked perpendicular to the top plate a strong but short tone is obtained. If the string is plucked parallel with the plate a weak but long tone is obtained. Normally the string is plucked at an angle slightly towards or away from the plate. Therefore the guitar tone can be regarded as consisting of two parts, one part resulting from the plucking perpendicular to and a second part from the plucking in parallel with the top plate. During the beginning of the tone, i.e., the initial part, vibrations from the plucking perpendicular to the plate dominate. After a while, in the late part, the vibrations in parallel take over and dominate. During the intervening time the two parts contribute equally, which results in a smooth transition from the initial part to the late part." And for those cynics who replied that such experiments have no influence on their actual playing, or were questioning their influence on mine, I am sorry to hear they are not open to improvements by experiment. Two very concrete, albeit onorthodox techniques I use to advantage and that have resulted from experiments like these: - Rest stroke (one finger is enough) for single notes in slow moving lines on the first string of a lute for a beautiful round sound. This is a different tone than the one you get from altrenating thumb-index with lots of relaxing swing in the elbow to obtain a free, singing tone, as would be more orthodox for these passages. - Especially on a baroque guitar and theorbo: slow arpeggio by placing the thumb rather flatly on the strings, pressing them all the way to the sound board (touching it) and releasing them by moving the thumbs to the next string, ending with the thumb moving over the sound board after releasing the first string. Round, evenly coloured, full-bodied chord without sharpness as we would get with a more angled pluck. On the baroque guitar you can actually see the top jump up and down. Drowns out the neigbouring theorbo. ;-) In both cases the initial pluck is as perpendicular as possible. Enough said, time to study. David **************************** David van Ooijen [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.davidvanooijen.nl **************************** To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
