Andy Culpepper -> RE: Sustain (Mar. 8 2016 23:57:30)
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There are different types of sustain. It's not simply a matter of striking a note, and measuring how long it rings. To me, the more important things on a flamenco guitar are 1) How quick is the attack and 2) How quickly does the initial attack die away. The note can have a long "tail" that continues to sound, as long as the meat of the initial note gets out of the way fast enough. Some flamenco guitars have a fair amount of raw sustain, but it can be fine or even desirable as long as fast runs and rasgueados have enough separation. I suspect the extra sustain comes from building the guitar "optimally", as a classical guitar maker would see it. This happens when the various resonances of the top and back are very well meshed together, not on top of each other, and not directly on scale notes (producing short "wolf" notes). To cut down on sustain, you basically want to suck all the energy out of the strings as quickly as possible, which is actually not so easy. One way you can do it is by building a very light guitar, so that the energy is dispersed to the sides and back which are less efficient at vibrating than the top. Another way is to loosen up the cross grain dipole, which is the resonance that can be visualized by thinking of the bridge ends flapping side-to-side. That comes from using more parallel braces and/or thinning the top more in that flexible area near the ends of the bridge wings.
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