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kitarist -> RE: Looking for an advice regarding scale length & guitar size (Jan. 10 2022 22:23:55)
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quote:
I have a Cordoba Cadete 3/4 size strung with light tension rectified Daddario Ej29 with low action and just lovely to play all day but the sound quality is crap.
That guitar has a 615mm scale length, whereas the D'Addario tension labels are meant at a reference scale length of 25.5 inches (647.7mm).
The on-guitar tension varies as the square of the scale length. When you use 'low tension' EJ29 on a shorter-scale guitar, the tension is actually even lower. In your case, the tension is only 90% (*) of the already-low tension listed by D'Addario for that string set. The total string-set tension on your guitar barely cracks 70 lbs total, so it might be that the sound quality is bad simply because the strings are too floppy.
To give you an idea of how low this is, the difference between D'Addario designations low->medium; medium->hard; hard->extra hard; is 3-4% - about 11% total from 'low' to 'extra hard'. This means that if you put 'hard tension' strings on your short-scale guitar, the tension would still be lower than what low tension would feel on a full-scale guitar. Before deciding to shop for a new guitar, perhaps you can explore this by trying a 'medium' or even 'hard' tension strings from the same company to see if the sound improves.
Or, even without buying new sets, just tune the guitar up one semitone. Since tension also varies with the square of the tuned frequency, this means increasing the tension by about 12% (**) - so doing this would give you a feel for strings just above low tension on a full-scale guitar.
(*) (615/647.7)^2 is about 90.2%.
(**) A semitone up is 2^(1/12) higher frequency, and the square of that is 2^(2/12) which is about 12.2% higher tension so you end up with net 0.902*1.122 = just 1% higher tension on your guitar with that tuning than what the tension would be for the same strings at regular tuning for a full scale guitar.
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