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Ricardo -> RE: String height at the bridge too high? (Mar. 27 2020 15:35:40)
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ORIGINAL: devilhand
quote:
9.5 mm ... ouch.
Poor guitar must have been traumatized. How high is the action at the bridge?
Thought a picture speaks 1000 words but I was wrong.
It is also 9.5 mm, maybe a little more. Not quite 10mm.
No, action at bridge does not affect tone...raising it increases volume slightly. Because the action height increases over fingerboard is the reason for this (attempted arguments that it’s about break angle over bridge don’t hold water for me based on my own experiments) as strings have more room to vibrate and increase amplitude rather than slap against frets. So the ideal set up design is low bridge but high ENOUGH action over fingerboard (achieved by neck angle mainly).
Playing capirote golpes often will be problematic no matter how high the bridge set up. What the result will be is the higher or lower developed callous on the preferred finger. (Some use i others use m finger). I learned this technique on my high action classical so maintain a very long callous you can see in photo on the pinky side of the i finger, a good inch above the nail bed.
Doing basic compas of various forms require doing golpes alone, opposite pulger, opposite the i down stroke and also the pulgar UP stroke with back of thumbnail. The first two are not much affected by the height of the bridge, but the last two ABSOLUTELY are. The lower the bridge the more comfortable those techniques are because to play fast and loud requires striking the string and soundboard simultaneously and fairly aggressively. The higher the bridge is, the more the soft skin around the nail bed gets exposed to violent string attacks. The spread between index and ring to do those golpes on accented chords increases, making it harder to make the dynamics strongly contrast, ie, it feels much weaker THAN if the strings were very close to the soundboard. If spreading between index and ring is not wide then one can really punch those accents hard. The up stroke with pulger required for many basic compas patterns such as rumba and abanico things, again, exposes the skin to that first string coming up if you want to hit the soundboard with the back of the nail IF the strings are high.
Another thing is up stroke with index, or other fingers you might use for upstroke. Some rumba guys develop callouses on the underside of the fingers from up strokes, again high strings make that callous longer. We mainly use index up and will again feel discomfort there from high strings.
The blood from the photo was caused by playing very loud the basic strumming techniques on this guitar that has a high bridge for several hours at a Juerga. This never happened to me before on my low bridge guitars after hundreds of loud juergas. I didn’t feel it at first when it happened an kept playing. But the main point is that when I test a guitar’s comfort and feel, the first thing I do check compas stuff. Invariably the low bridge guitars are more fun to play, even if string height over the fingerboard is high, for this reason. 9mm is high already. Ideally we need 8 mm or lower. Lower than 7mm we start hitting soundboard with rest stroke picados. 7-8.5mm is the Goldilocks zone.
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