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Posts: 1770
Joined: Jul. 11 2003
From: The Netherlands
Stings is Carbon more elastic?
Just a quick question,
I have used carbon strings for a while, but is carbon more elastic than nylon? And, does that effect the “control” of the strings? Like the different a bit with long sustain and short sustan guitars.
I seems to notice that when I get back to nylon again. The tension of the strings is both medium.
Posts: 3487
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
RE: Stings is Carbon more elastic? (in reply to gerundino63)
My experience with carbon (actually fluorocarbon) strings is that they are more resistant to stretching than nylon.
On a classical guitar I own I tried a number of different string sets. Intonation was good with nylon. Carbon strings went sharp at higher frets.
The guitar has a fairly normal classical setup: 4mm at the 12th fret on the sixth string, a little over 3mm on the first. At the first fret the open strings are about 1mm above the fret.
Nylon strings play in tune, carbons get sharper at higher frets.
Fretting a string stretches it, increasing the tension, tending to make it play sharper. Classical guitars are typically compensated. The 12th fret is a little further from the bridge saddle than it is from the nut. As you go up the fingerboard the added length becomes a greater and greater fraction of the sounding length of the string. This increasing flattening of the note offsets the increasing sharpness due to the string being stretched more and more as the height of the action increases at the higher frets.
Carbon strings going sharp at higher frets indicate that their tension increases more than nylon, for the same amount of stretch due to fretting.
Carbon strings can be made to play in tune by increasing the compensation, that is, moving the bridge saddle further from the nut, or moving the 12th fret further from the bridge saddle, along with the other frets proportionally—a new fingerboard.
On this guitar, and my the other classicals I tried them on, carbon strings were too loud and brilliant, so I remain satisfied with nylon.
Flamenco guitars, with their low action, are often made with little or no compensation. The 12th fret is nearly equidistant from the nut and the bridge saddle.
With the lower action, and less stretching when the string is fretted, flamenco guitars are less sensitive to the differences between nylon and carbon.
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