estebanana -> RE: Guitar Physics (Dec. 17 2014 1:56:37)
|
There's a saying: "Luthiery is not rocket science, it's harder." ________________ Read Alan Carruth's works, he is vetted and does not do dumb experiments. His work is carefully done and checked, and he works on problems that have practical applications in real building. His stuff is pretty solid and some of it is quite difficult to read unless you have some advanced science background. In particular his study of saddle break angle is excellent and his big work called 'String Theory' is very good. Despite the obvious pun in the title, it is an exhaustive look at guitar strings in tension, motion, structure and what happens to them as they move. He figures out some things we already knew by ear, and few new things we did not know. Some people also swear by the book of the Australian called Trevor Gore, but he kind of uses the research to support a proprietary bracing system and the cost is prohibitive for casual reading. But he did a lot of work. One thing to remember is that many things on the guitar seem provable with physics, yet in practice the guitar does not actually function as is is proved out to function. Like if you think the treble side of the bridge and treble side fan braces control the treble strings you would be scientifically wrong. Yet there is some bearing to the common sense visual logic as it applies to guitar function. It is truly a strange and contradictory box. And the tone generation science where makers excite the guitar with a tone to see how the various points resonate. That stuff does work to a degree, but good guitars also don't adhere to the same parameters that other good guitars show. There are different kinds of 'good' guitars. Carruth says, we know how to make a good guitar almost every time after looking at the research, but we are still figuring out how to make a great guitar. The great guitar is probably not possible to quantify, good guitars fall into some what calculable ranges. After nearly 500 years, violinmakers are still not clear on why the bass bar functions. They know if you whittle it here or there it changes the violin a bit, but not really why.
|
|
|
|