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RE: What efect does scale length have on string tension or hardness of playing?   You are logged in as Guest
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GuitarVlog

Posts: 441
Joined: Mar. 19 2009
From: San Francisco Bay Area

RE: What efect does scale length hav... (in reply to a_arnold) 
quote:

ORIGINAL: a_arnold
I was pleasantly surprised to find out how positive Brune is about Chica guitars (I have 2). And even more surprised to learn that Segovia's negative feelings toward the flamenco community derived from his perception that they leaked the facts about his illegitimacy. I knew he was illegitimate and raised by an aunt and uncle, but I didn't know he was upset at the flamenco community for revealing it.

Does anybody know details about who is supposed to have revealed his secret?

I don't know who his biological parents were. That would be interesting to learn.


I don't know the stories but there was a discussion at the link below. It looks like some people didn't want to accept that Segovia was an illegitimate child and suggest that his fathering by a flamenco player is nonsense.

http://www.delcamp.us/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=54505

I'm sure Richard would know.

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  REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |  Date Dec. 21 2010 19:39:22
 
Richard Jernigan

Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA

RE: What efect does scale length hav... (in reply to a_arnold) 
I'm reading "Andrés Segovia, Vida y Obra" by Alberto López Poveda. It is a detailed and highly documented biography, published by the University of Jaén. López freely admits being a trusted friend of Segovia, and the two volume work is quite admiring of its subject.

The account of Segovia's birth in Linares, to his married mother and father, and his subsequent baptism in Jaén is well documented. López reproduces both the February 24, 1893 entry in the civil registry of Linares, recording Segovia's birth on the 21st of February, 1893, the legitimate offspring of his parents and grandparents, and the baptismal certificate in Jaén on the 27th of March.

Segovia lived with his parents in Jaén for two years. In 1895 Segovia's parents separated. This was when he came under his uncle's care in Villalcarillo, at the age of two. He lived there with his aunt and uncle until 1903. After a brief stay in Manzanares, the family moved to Granada.

Angelo Gilardino, a distinguished composer, player, and professor, who edited Segovia's musical archives--and by no means an unconditional admirer of Segovia--once said, "If it would take a thousand pages to write an artistic biography of this man, it would take ten thousand to extinguish all the legends that have grown up around him."

RNJ
  REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |  Date Dec. 21 2010 22:06:17
 
cathulu

Posts: 950
Joined: Dec. 15 2006
From: Vancouver, Canukistan

RE: What efect does scale length hav... (in reply to XXX) 
I think we agree more than we disagree. I don't want to parse my language or yours and get into semantics.

Unless you physically go out and measure something, then you are relying on "muscles, nerves and most of all the brain" paraphrased to figure out what is going on. We rely on sensory input from our five real senses and our brain.

Unfortunately, our brains can play tricks on us and we can convince ourselves of a truth that does or may not exist - like there is a big difference between 650mm and 660mm scale. Or maybe one guitar that so and so made is better than this lesser luthier's product.

Perhaps in truth the only real perceptible difference to us is the measurement itself. That is what I am basically arguing. There is no real difference in playbility or sound. I am arguing you would not know you were playing a 650mm scale or a 660mm scale unless you measured it directly or someone told you - unless maybe you were a highly exceptional human being and finely tuned. YMMV.

I gave some examples where our senses can make truth is hard to come by. Here is one more... do you trust your senses?

http://www.illusion-optical.com/Optical-Illusions/LineArrows.php
  REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |  Date Dec. 22 2010 0:03:00
 
Andy Culpepper

Posts: 3023
Joined: Mar. 30 2009
From: NY, USA

RE: What efect does scale length hav... (in reply to cathulu) 
quote:

I am arguing you would not know you were playing a 650mm scale or a 660mm scale unless you measured it directly or someone told you


In general I think that is true. My friend had a 660 guitar that I actually thought from playing it that it was SHORT scale like 640. The size and shape of the body and the shape of the neck can influence your perceptions a lot.

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  REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |  Date Dec. 22 2010 1:29:13
 
Anders Eliasson

Posts: 5780
Joined: Oct. 18 2006
 

RE: What efect does scale length hav... (in reply to GuitarVlog) 
quote:

Unfortunately, our brains can play tricks on us and we can convince ourselves of a truth that does or may not exist - like there is a big difference between 650mm and 660mm scale. Or maybe one guitar that so and so made is better than this lesser luthier's product.


I´ve learnt not to trust my brain to much. The brain is tool and thats it. If you are lucky, its a good tool.

The stiffness of the guitar plays a major role in how big a guitar feels. I personally dont care much about scale length and think its way overrated. I personally play 650mm now because its kind of good enough for me and after having built some 80 flamenco guitars I cant really say that different scale length affects the sound or playability in a certain way.

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  REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |  Date Dec. 22 2010 9:01:11
 
Ruphus

Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
 

RE: What efect does scale length hav... (in reply to GuitarVlog) 
There is a long-scale vintage flamenca that a friend of mine found very hard to play, while I don´t find it distinctly different from standard scale.

I would think that Mr. Eliasson´s mentioning of body size to be right on the matter of playability.
As I read in a very plausible appearing interview from Mr. Dammann: The bigger the corpus, namely the tops surface, the more string impulse it needs to swing in.
( In the same time accounting for why smaller bodies like e.g. with violins yield such volume / - ... and why I in the end discovered to prefere parlor acoustics to dreadnoughts for instance.)
Accordingly, with bigger corpus you need more string tension and string attack in order to get the top vibrating appropriately.

I remember a huge Martin acoustic I had ... Boy, was that thing hard to work on for both, left and right hand!
Most who tried playing it could only get whispering sound out of it, unless they used a pick.

...

Meanwhile I think the idea reasonable that dreadnoughts mainly came to life so that as their side-job Arlo Guthrie could used them as a defence tool against the gory cops and mercenaries of his time.

Ruphus
  REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |  Date Dec. 22 2010 10:01:36
 
mark indigo

 

Posts: 3625
Joined: Dec. 5 2007
 

RE: What efect does scale length hav... (in reply to cathulu) 
quote:

Unfortunately, our brains can play tricks on us


take 3 bowls. Fill one with hot water, as hot as you think you can bear it without it burning you. Fill another with cold water, as cold as you think you can bear it, put some ice in it to make sure. Fill the third bowl with tepid/room temperature/in between temperature water.

Now put one hand in the hot and the other in the cold water for a couple of minutes. Then put both hands in the in third bowl. One hand will tell you that water is hot, the other one will tell you that water is cold. Feelings are unreliable because they are relative (to what they are used to).
  REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |  Date Dec. 22 2010 12:48:52
 
XXX

Posts: 4400
Joined: Apr. 14 2005
 

RE: What efect does scale length hav... (in reply to cathulu) 
I see it pretty simple. If somebody says to me "you are not able to feel a difference" without any knowledge that could back it up, it is hokus pokus, let alone being able to tell a concrete figure like 5%. AGAIN, we were talking about perception of guitar playing which is a PRETTY COMPLEX THING. I dont think any scientist on earth can really give a formula "what the limit is regarding scale length that guitarrist can feel a difference".

It is EXTREMELY tedious for me to repeat that there are other factors in guitar playing that for me personally are more important, TOO. Ok we agreed 100 times on that already. BUT to say the scale length makes no difference is simply wrong. The question was N O T "is scale length the most important factor in guitar playing". For practical purpose, when you buy a guitar it doesnt play a role as playability is affected by other factors too. I have never asked the seller about scale. But theoretically it is WRONG to say there is no effect.

Mark, im sure any medic can explain to you why that very experiment of yours "works" that way (confusion of receptors or whatever). With guitar playing i doubt that. The conclusion from that is that as long there is no scientific evidence which contradicts my feelings, and nobody will be able to do a research on guitar playing for a long time, there is no reason to doubt the feelings in that very field.

Merry Christmas btw!

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  REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |  Date Dec. 22 2010 15:57:34
 
mark indigo

 

Posts: 3625
Joined: Dec. 5 2007
 

RE: What efect does scale length hav... (in reply to XXX) 
quote:

im sure any medic can explain to you why that very experiment of yours "works" that way (confusion of receptors or whatever).


why it works is because the hand that goes in the cold water and then to the medium water registers an increase in temperature 100% accurately. The hand that goes from the hot water to the medium water registers a decrease in temperature 100% correctly. In the absence of injury or disease the information from the nervous system is accurate, but as it registers change, it is always relative to what has gone before. This is a general movement principle that applies to all activity and movement.

btw i actually don't know which "side" of this debate i have entered on, i don't really know anything much about scale length, just happened to be reading this thread and picked up on the comment about the brain playing tricks.... i'm not trying to support the scale length thing one way or the other....
  REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |  Date Dec. 22 2010 19:48:58
 
rojarosguitar

Posts: 243
Joined: Dec. 8 2010
 

RE: What efect does scale length hav... (in reply to XXX) 
Hello,

that the tension rises with the scale length is quite obvious: this is the same principle as the one standing behind having frets on the guitar: given same tension the string needs to be shorter for higher pitch. You have to rise the tension, if you go a fret back but still want to have same pitch (say you want to have G on the F# fret).

Now you can reverse that: given the same pitch but longer string length, the tension needs to be higher ...

The nonlinear formula (there is a square root involved) for the relationship between tension and pitch and scale length is quite straight forward physics; but it rests on one assumption that is only true for a certain range of string tension: it's the assumption, that the physical properties of the material stay same independently of the tension applied.

This quite true for materials far from the breaking limit, unfortunately guitar strings operate quite close to (though not quite at) the breaking limit (as many of us have experienced painfully by being hit by a breaking string).

So the real relationship between tension, scale length and pitch is probabely quite wild compared to the simpler textbook formula, but the latter is stiil good enough for at least estimating the necessary tension for a given pitch and scale length.

best wishes
Robert

PS My experience is that you do feel the difference between different scale lengths; but that depends on many factors.

- how well the action is adjusted
- neck shape
- the limits of your own hand
- thy type of fine motorics you have (some people are better at minute movements,
some prefer gross movements of the fingers)
- string tension.

Soundwise one can expect a slight shift towards the bass strength.

Recently I had the chance to compare three guitars that were all very well made:

An old Miguel Rodriguez with 670 scale (!), a Sebstian Stenzel 640 Scale and my own Baarslag with 650 scale. I was surprized that the Rodriguez was quite easy to play for me, but it was definitely strange feeling. The Rodriguez had a huge bass but slightly weaker trebles - which of course can have many reasons.

The Stenzel has a wonderful sound, and I even consider to buy it, but the scale length feels too short, kind of a bit crowded, for me.

You really need to have these experiences, it's quite difficult to say what happens just on the basis of thinking.
  REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |  Date Dec. 24 2010 10:03:21
 
a_arnold

 

Posts: 558
Joined: Jul. 30 2006
 

RE: What efect does scale length hav... (in reply to rojarosguitar) 
quote:

The nonlinear formula (there is a square root involved) for the relationship between tension and pitch and scale length is quite straight forward


I'd love to know the formula. Can you post it? Or a web site?

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"Flamenco is so emotionally direct that a trained classical musician would require many years of highly disciplined formal study to fail to understand it."
  REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |  Date Dec. 24 2010 13:26:19
 
a_arnold

 

Posts: 558
Joined: Jul. 30 2006
 

RE: What efect does scale length hav... (in reply to Anders Eliasson) 
quote:

I´ve learnt not to trust my brain to much.


I agree. Sometimes my brain just seems to have a mind of its own.

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"Flamenco is so emotionally direct that a trained classical musician would require many years of highly disciplined formal study to fail to understand it."
  REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |  Date Dec. 24 2010 13:28:07
 
Richard Jernigan

Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA

RE: What efect does scale length hav... (in reply to a_arnold) 
quote:

ORIGINAL: a_arnol

I'd love to know the formula. Can you post it? Or a web site?


The formula and a link to its derivation are in the audio/video upload section

http://tinyurl.com/2frjypu

RNJ
  REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |  Date Dec. 25 2010 12:29:13
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