On Fri, Jun 26, 2009, Oskar De Mari <[email protected]> said:
> isn't the Baeir string-density calculator just his interpretation? never used it, so cant speak to that from experience. The formulae involved are well known, but require information about physical property(s) of the strings which are not always easy to find or guess at; even knowing what the material is can be a challenge, which steel alloy is that? how was it tempered? Rose iron strings, what alloy? tempered after drawing? Malcom Rose will tell you, but the piano repair guy you sing with in choir who does harpsichords on the side and has some spare string he sold you a couple lenghs of cant recall where he got it from, so doesnt know. Lord only knows what to use for the silver wire you drew yourself from stock left over from jewelry making two decades ago. The calculators give you a reasonable guess, they are NOT prescriptive. > If our lute's bridge can take the increased tension and theres the rub. The maker can take a spare rib, a spare length of top material, glue em up and put them on the test fixture to run some possibly destructive tension tests. You have one instrument you DONT want to test to that extreme; and it is difficult to measure string deflection force on a live instrument; so you need to consider the change in sound the string has when its tension is raised high enough to test the youngs modulus (ie, that point at which its deformation becomes inelastic). > isn't it possible to string at a given pitch, but with thicker > strings than the string calculator suggests for that pitch? yes. but the harmonic series and sound formants produced will be subtly different, you might or might not like the difference (flamenco vs classical vs folk). Almost all of us on this list have some experience with guitars before taking up the lute, we are accustomed to having to choose low, medium, high tension string sets. If you patronize NRI for wire strings you have similar range of choices, further limited by the fact that they primarily sell to harpsichord enthusiasts and stock sizes suited for that market (perfectly reasonable, want them staying in business after all) Not entirely certain of this, but I suspect that better quality instruments have less flexibility in tension; the factory built instrument has a design that is tolerant of imperfections at all stages of manufacture (this is good engineering practice when in mass production, probably trades off extra mass against extra gluing surface for the bridge; the increased margin of safety tolerates a higher tension stringing, but may also shorten the life of the instrument by deforming the neck or overwhelming the top braceing. -- Dana Emery To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
