Welcome to one of the most active flamenco sites on the Internet. Guests can read most posts but if you want to participate click here to register.
This site is dedicated to the memory of Paco de Lucía, Ron Mitchell, Guy Williams, Linda Elvira, Philip John Lee, Craig Eros, Ben Woods, David Serva and Tom Blackshear who went ahead of us.
We receive 12,200 visitors a month from 200 countries and 1.7 million page impressions a year. To advertise on this site please contact us.
|
|
|
Nut width history
|
You are logged in as Guest
|
|
Users viewing this topic: none
|
|
Login  | |
|
   
estebanana
Posts: 9358
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
|
 RE: Nut width history (in reply to El Burdo)
|
|
|
Gut strings might have something to so with the smaller nut widths, but then again maybe not. Gut strings feel different and are different in diameter for each pitch needed on the guitar. depending on the set of gut strings the diameter could be smaller than nylon giving a feeling of more space, but of course that is compared to what.
I've made a few vihuelas which are "double coursed", two strings per pitch. The nut widths are quite narrow, without looking at my notes I seem to remember 47mm - 45 mm 48mm as possible nut widths. There is always talk in the early music scene of musicians who play modern guitar wanting to get into lute and vihuela playing and complaining about the narrower nuts. They will often ask for a vihuela to be made with modern nut width that matches that on thew guitar so they can move back and forth from modern guitar to vihuela easily. There are a few problems, mostly that the lute family of instruments, into which the vihuela loosely falls, use a right hand "under-over" thumb & forefinger technique for plucking the strings. It requires you clip your finger nails and use the fleshy pads of the fingers.
So this has nothing to do with left hand, right? Maybe not so fast, it could have a lot wot do with left hand and nut width. Here's why; the way the right hand activates the string has a lot to do with the space between strings at the bridge. One type of technique might be better if the strings are closer together, the example I cited is the over-under lute style, but what about the "classical" guitar in the 19th century? The styles of right hand playing must have been different than they are today. There was one style where the player rested the pinky on the top of the guitar, another where the player did not use fingernails to engage the strings.
Think about all the ways in which those Torres era guitars where played, how they were set up with gut strings and how the right hand would activate the strings in relation to the strings spacing at the bridge. Today's flamenco or classical player would perhaps have a more robust right hand style in terms of arpeggios and picado. Maybe a lot of wider bridge string widths developed as a matter of how right hand technique has become very strong.
There's a funny often missed geometric quirk about the Torres guitar which has basically not changed into modern guitar making. The bass E to treble E spacing on a Spanish guitar bridge is usually equal to the width of the neck at the 12th fret. The string spacing narrows by that proportion all the way back to the nut. So if you come up with a distance you want the string to be from the edge of the fingerboard, like say 5mm on the treble E at the nut, you can project the fingerboard taper by knowing how much distance you want is between for bass E to Treble E.
That all sounds wacky, but here is what is salient, overall nut width may not have been first determined by saying "Hey Tony I want a 52mm nut" the player might have said I want this much distance from string to string, one inch and 7/8". - (Torres used inches not mm, anyway another topic) - or maybe the guitar makers just had a standard string spacing at the nut, they projected back and forth from bridge to nut to arrive at a neck taper. The outside dimension of the nut at the peghead is determined outside neck width. Maybe we've come to talk about it as outside nut width, like 52mm to 54mm, because the guitar has been round long enough to have changed. But whn you speak of 52mm you're really talking about how much distance the two outside strings have from fingerboard edge vis a vis how you project neck taper........... which brings you back to the ratio of body neck join width being equal to that of string spacing at the bridge.
Maybe in Torres' day they were thinking more about string spacing at the nut in terms of gut string diameters. And also that geometric idea that the 12th fret width is generally equal to the string spacing at the bridge and this projects to the nut. ( Yes go to your guitars and measure it. A classically built Spanish guitar will express that ratio!) Also that right hand technique may have favored less string spacing at the bridge and how that effects the way the neck taper ratio works.
Confused? You should be.
So they were not pulling these measurements out of their asses, they were working with the ratio of distance between strings and type of strings, gut and how those factors effected the way people played.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
|
|
|
|
REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Apr. 6 2012 1:54:54
 |
|
 New Messages |
 No New Messages |
 Hot Topic w/ New Messages |
 Hot Topic w/o New Messages |
 Locked w/ New Messages |
 Locked w/o New Messages |
|
Post New Thread
Reply to Message
Post New Poll
Submit Vote
Delete My Own Post
Delete My Own Thread
Rate Posts
|
|
|
Forum Software powered by ASP Playground Advanced Edition 2.0.5
Copyright © 2000 - 2003 ASPPlayground.NET |
0.078125 secs.
|
Printable Version
but common?
