a_arnold -> RE: What efect does scale length have on string tension or hardness of playing? (Dec. 20 2010 22:49:39)
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I would be interested. Until World War 2, guitar strings were made of gut. Nylon was introduced as a miracle fabric by DuPont at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 (hence the “Ny” in “Nylon”) and the monofilament was immediately adopted as a low-cost substitute for woven fishing line. Nylon found other uses as the escalation of World War II interrupted the supply of parachute silk from the Orient and cut off Segovia’s access to his German supplier of guitar strings. By that time, flamencos living in Andalucian fishing villages had already adopted Nylon monofilament fishing line for guitar strings as a cheaper and more durable substitute for gut. Segovia was undoubtedly aware of this use of Nylon, although he did not credit the gypsy community with its first use, perhaps because of his well-known emnity for flamencos (said to stem from a belief that his illegitimacy was first made public through the flamenco community). Segovia turned to DuPont for help in directly supplying guitar strings from the spectrum of sizes of nylon monofilament they were already producing for fishing line, tennis racquets etc. His early success led him to persuade Augustine to further develop the concept, and the Nylon guitar string was officially born. The innovation was readily accepted by the musical community, thanks to the combination of lower cost, greater durability, increased tonal predictability, and (in no small part) to Segovia’s stature as a musician. However, a nylon string the same diameter as a gut string requires more tension to bring it up to pitch, a factor that greatly influenced subsequent guitar development. When the new strings were first put on older guitars that had been designed for lower tension gut strings, they tended to be significantly louder, but many older instruments came apart under the tension and many of the survivors eventually became dead-sounding. This phase in guitar history played a major role in the belief that guitars have a limited life span. However, the change to Nylon also led to the development of more robust designs (the Ramirez shop led the field in these innovations) and the resulting increased volume did much to turn the guitar into an instrument suitable for the concert hall. At that time, electrical amplification had not yet yielded acceptable tonal fidelity, and a louder instrument could do much to increase the scope of potential performance venues, which in turn propelled luthiers and performers in their ongoing quest for greater projection and volume. The recognition that greater tension yields more volume and projection has contributed to further experimentation with longer scale lengths (a longer string requires more tension to reach standard pitch) as well as with variable diameters and compositions of strings.
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