Richard Jernigan -> RE: string tension/scale length??? (Mar. 21 2013 22:25:25)
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ORIGINAL: britguy Richard: You have some very interesting statistics on string length and tension that I never saw before. More or less the point of my post. Where did these figures come from? Also the point about Carlos M. detuning to A440 when capoed. Very interesting. Is this very common? (Now I dont feel so weird about tuning a couple of mine to A432. ) First, Carlos Montoya: I don't remember where I read this the first time, but I sat up close at a couple of concerts and it was fairly obvious that he had a really low action, a capo on the first fret, and pretty loose strings, so I believed it when I read it. He may even have capoed on the second fret and tuned lower at times. Second (and probably not very helpful), I was educated as a mathematician and physicist, and worked most of my life in those fields and engineering. The standard introduction to wave theory is a study of the mechanics of a stretched string, idealized to be perfectly elastic (i.e. lossless) and without resistance to bending. The theory actually comes pretty close to predicting the behavior of musical instrument strings, except for the energy being sucked away by being used to generate sound. This Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrating_string copies what appears in lots of physics textbooks. There's some calculus in it, and some elementary physics. You can get the result that for a fixed pitch and string composition, tension varies with the square of the string length from the second equation under the heading "Frequency of the Wave". I did some work at various times over the years with the classical 3-D electromagnetic wave equations, so the stuff kind of stuck in memory. The data on the difference between normal and high tension strings comes from the string manufacturers web sites, sometimes in a form that requires some algebra to calculate the actual tension. RNJ
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