I've heard recordings of Michael Hedges and Pat Metheny playing "harp-guitars" - acoustic guitars with strangely shaped, oversized bodies that included a number of tunable drone strings that resonated sympathetically with the notes struck on the playable strings, and it very much makes a difference to the sound. Sounds like a really interesting reverb, basically. A similar sound can be heard if you hold a piano's damper pedal down and have someone play a trumpet into its sound board, except with a piano, it's much fuller of a reverb and isn't key-dependent like a sitar or harp-guitar since all the chromatic notes are available to resonate. (Actually, singing into the soundhole a free-standing acoustic guitar would probably be a closer analogy. In fact, those of you with an acoustic guitar handy could hold it carefully in front of your favorite phonograph's horn, where nothing muted its strings, and see kinda what it sounds like the inventors were hoping to do with the Klingsor.)
As such, I would be very surprised if the strings didn't add a shiny, strange reverb quality to certain notes coming from the horn. The problem, musically speaking, would be that the speed of the playback would need to give a musical pitch equal to the tuning of the strings -- i.e., if the strings were tuned relative to A=440Hz and the record played back just a little off, the strings would sound awful. As we know, 78.26 didn't become a universally observed standard until many years after the acoustic recording era, and even modern turntables are rarely dead-on (not to mention that many lathes weren't spot-on during the original recording sessions anyway), so unless you tuned the strings for each record or tuned the phonograph's speed to the strings for each record, they ain't gonna sound none too purty. Best to all, Robert ----- Original Message ----- From: <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, September 12, 2005 8:05 PM Subject: Re: [Phono-L] Klingsor > > In a message dated 9/12/2005 3:27:51 P.M. Mountain Daylight Time, > [email protected] writes: > > If anyone (Art?) would like the full patent direct from the uspto.gov > web site, drop me a line... I've compiled it into a neat little > (576k) PDF and will be happy to email it. > > Loran > > > Loran--That would be great. According to Allen Konigsberg the tuning of the > strings would probably not be included in the patent application, but the > whole thing would be nice. > Just send it to me off list if you wish. > > Thanks, Art > _______________________________________________ > Phono-L mailing list > [email protected] > > Phono-L Archive > http://www.oldcrank.org/pipermail/phono-l/ >
