Ricardo -> RE: Specs in a guitar plan (Feb. 9 2018 15:27:24)
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ORIGINAL: jshelton5040 quote:
ORIGINAL: Ricardo I am pretty good at guessing just by playing the thing and I think I prefer less compensation personally. This statement is puzzling to me. A guitar either plays in tune (roughly) or it doesn't. Well perhaps you never noticed two players play the same instrument back to back, and one guy sounded more “in tune” than the other guy? THis has to do with technique and the ear balancing the intonation while playing. Can’t tell you how many times I watch careless fingered players tune their guitar with a tuner then proceed to play out of tune many chords and melodic notes that are important. I learned that this was a specific thing to deal with as a teenager when I changed a bolt on neck on my electric guitar and had to come to terms quickly with both the problems with equal temp system plus the inaccuracies the fingers deliver to everything except open strings. The intonation issue is not so obvious on nylon string guitars, and the lower the action the less the left hand will affect things. However it was many many years of playing and confirming the importance of left hand technique before I discovered this compensation thing that luthiers had been doing. A private discussion with Richard Brune where he gave me actual measurements for various builders that a light bulb went off in my head, and now I can pretty much tell which guitars are compensated more or less. What it came down to physically is this....you know vibrato technique (side to side not bending up and down) produces either a higher or lower pitch, correct? So this occurs every time we place a finger on a string to some degree. I argue against tuning to chords or ANY fretted notes and such for this reason. Next, the player becomes aware of lowering pitch pushing toward the bridge and raises it pulling away (opposite of a violin or cello because of the fixed fret)...I had been aware since a teen how “sweet” or “Flat” the high position notes on my dad’s Hauser were compared to all my other guitars, so much that I tend to pull back on notes in upper position....and when Brune told me how far back Hauser liked to position his bridge relative to other builders, it all made sense. So when I play and I hear my harmonic environment, when I play a guitar I will be pushing pulling etc to some degree, very precisely each note I play. And the higher the action the more careful I have to be because a push or pull will be quite exaggerated. Compensated guitars I find I need to pull on more than un compensated guitars, which I have to push on the notes, depending on the interval. A specific example might be if I hear an E chord harmony, when I play notes in the upper register, I fine tune the melody by pulling back a hair on a B note, but pushing forward on a G# for example. It is not something I literally need to think about, I have been playing this way since I was a teen and it’s just how the ear dictates what our fingers need to do. One last thing is, old trebles strings wear down and tend to go sharp up the fingerboard....so I tend to over compensate by pushing forward on old strings...until I actual feel my self doing it physically and realize it’s time to change the strings.
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