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RE: Sustain
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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 RE: Sustain (in reply to Stephen Eden)
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quote:
Ethan it could perhaps be low density not to stiff spruce. So they needed to keep it thicker to stay within there stiffness guidelines. This is where Anders should jump in and say pay no attention to the plans thickness just go with what the wood tells you!
And to that I would add stiff bridge, wide plantilla and glue blocks that don't encroach too much upon the inner rim. Make the glue blocks or liner on the thin side for less of the classical singing sustain.
The goal is to get a top which is not flabby when braced and glued to the rim, that has the right amount of play between the edges of the lower bouts and the wings of the bridge. The top can be naturally flexible if it has a stiff bridge and good braces. I have observed in my building that thicker tops with a lot of brace support, and a not so wide plantilla make guitars with singing sustain. While thick tops with wider bouts and less structure are more flamenco....very generally speaking.
I think bridge has also do so with it, but very hard to quantify in some way you can talk about it. The difference between thick top and wide plantilla and very supported top, thick with less lower bout width is relational. Wider lower bouts seem to give more breathing space for thicker tops.
The bridge stiffness, top flexibility and lower bout width all play carefully making thicker tops work. The bridge is a brace and on wide plantillas and narrower ones too, I feel that is an important part.
I have thought very carefully along about bridge stiffness and that study has made a big difference in how to shape sound with some predictability. The top thickness bridge working together are super important, the bridge is not just a hunk of wood, it has a to do with sustain and voice.
Thinking globally over the whole guitar, the neck seems very important, but thinking locally the top, and bridge match is more salient to th esustain conversation. To my way of seeing it anyway.
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Date Mar. 11 2016 10:33:46
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Sustain (in reply to constructordeguitarras)
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quote:
I have a book on historical lute construction (THE book) and I'm thinking about the puny bridges on lutes, which have the least sustain....
I think you could make a lute that had long sustain in the basses, but probably not the trebles so lutes are built to show the gut treble strings to best advantage. Some of the bigger lutes have a lot of sustain quality. The six course lutes from the mid Reniassance are usually 60cm scale tuned in G like guitar with capo on third fret and G string lowered one half step. Even those lutes can have a lot of bass sustain, but I think they are built to take advantage of the attack and decay to make it sound like a swelling and dying. Lute players say the sound 'blossoms' and they try to take advantage of that swelling an decay by letting it hang in the air. Baroque lutes really do have some courses that can ring for along time, the lower courses can sustain for a long time.
I would be careful about a direct correlation between bridge length and sustain in thinking of lute bring as a model for guitar. Different structure and ways to voice it. If you want to build one let me know, I now a bit about it. I think the bridges are small because the whole system is proportional to the thinness of the to and the really small diameter of the strings.
There is one lesson lutes bridges show that is possible to think about for the guitar. That is in how much surface area it really takes to make a bridge to top glued connection. Lutes bridges are small and narrow and yet they hold the tension of a 13 course baroque lute, a six course Ren lute, a therobo with bass strings more than a meter long, all with the same basic bridge design. The bridge is always narrow but proportioned to the correct length to hold the strings a no more.
This tells me the guitar bridge is over built for a reason because a bridge with a much smaller footprint will successfully attach the strings to the top. I wager you could cut the wings off the Spanish guitar bridge and it would hold the strings to the top with no problem whatsoever. This indicates the bridge serves two functions:
1. Hold the strings to the top. It is over designed for this function alone.
2. Moderate the guitar voice according to how it is shaped, how the stiffness is distributed and how this interacts with the top. At some point the guitar structure used a more lute like bridge,then as the structure changed the bridge it was discovered needed to be longer to sound purpose.
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Date Mar. 12 2016 0:14:43
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Andy Culpepper
Posts: 3023
Joined: Mar. 30 2009
From: NY, USA
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RE: Sustain (in reply to krichards)
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I have a 2001 top end Conde Negra in the shop right now and I was surprised by how thick/stiff the top is. Plus those massive braces going up through the lower harmonic bar. Very heavy overall. By all the rules of guitar making, these things should sound terrible.  I haven't tried it with fresh strings yet so I reserve judgement on this particular one, but the pulsation is very stiff. Although the notes did jump out in a very immediate way.
My first flamenco guitar was a severely overbuilt blanca, under the name Francisco Solera, in the $1000 range.
It required a very strong technique, and lacked volume so much that it was embarrassing whenever I compared it to my teacher's guitar.
But, when I recorded with it, lo and behold it sounded amazing. It was very dry in that it lacked harmonics/overtones, which made it sound very focused and fundamentally supported on the recording. I think that is one of the great strengths of Condes and "Madrid style" guitars in general, although I think I and most other luthiers don't like building in that style.
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Andy Culpepper, luthier
http://www.andyculpepper.com
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Date Mar. 15 2016 23:20:58
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Sustain (in reply to RobJe)
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The reason Conde's have robust thick tops is because it is easier to build a successful guitar with crappy wood if you leave a soft punky top thicker. It's not mystery.
The factory guitar are not being made with high grade wood so to hedge against product defect make the top thick. It also happens to generally make a certain kind of voice, with the right bridge.
It is not that difficult to make Conde' sound, but why bother to build like that when the customer can simply buy a Conde?
quote:
1) What do we mean by sustain? If luthiers and flamenco guitarists talk to each other this is everyone’s business.
(2) What amount of sustain do flamenco guitarists want? This is the business of flamenco guitarists (many luthiers are also players so it is their business as well.)
These are important questions but they are difficult to discuss. This is partly because we don’t have a shared understanding of the language used. Another problem is that we don’t have access to the same experiences. Imagine all the contributors to this thread being able to sit in a room with a dozen or so different guitars, passing them round, playing them and talking about them. We might get somewhere then. Dreams!
I agree with Stephen that the issue is not simply about how rapidly a note decays. I am interested in his terms “controlled supported sustain” and “loose unsupported sustain” but I could not be sure if we would use them in the same way. When I play a guitar long enough to get to know it and adjust my playing to get the best I can out of it I think of how “dry” it is. I suppose the opposite should be “wet”.
An example of what I think is loose and floppy would be if you look up Hamza el Din on YouTube and find his album 'Escalay' and listen to the bass note drone he plays. He is an oudi but I think you know that.
Hamzas oud bass notes are perfect to illustrate a bass that drones on and on, even 5hough that is not a guitar, a good model sound.
Supported sustain would be more like a recording of Segovia playing his famous Hauser. A different envelope of bass sound with a different rate of decay, slightly shorter, but bass that has a colorful overtone shine. Or any Fleta or other heavy braced guitar that sings like an old timey Italian Tenor or Baritone with eco and clarity.
Do those examples pardon the pun, resonate with you?
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When I think about beautiful treble sound I also usually don't think about guitars as a model, I think of soprano singers Like Bidu Sayao who was a great singer. The Bachianas Braziliera #5 for soprano and eight celli was written for her.
When looking for sound ideals in sustain and voice I find myself going outside the guitar world terms and examples because I find them sonically incestuous. Guitars all sound like other guitars, more difficult to get a bearing on what sound I am thinking about. I switched to thinking about guitar sound quality in terms of flamenco singers and opera singers. Mostly older ones from early or mid 20th century.
If you listen to sopranos, baritones and tenors you get the whole range. Opera singers are good to compare sustain and overtone qualities and flamenco singers are the metallic eco in a dry flamenco guitar.
Once removed from comparing guitar on guitar you get a kind of other definition of sound. Like take four sopranos, Bidu Sayao, Elizabeth Schartzkopf,
Leontyne Price and Kirsten Flagstad. Ok ....I want Leontyne Price and Bidu Sayao trebles not the other two. Think most flamencos would Schartzkopf -Flagstad trebles, but I wan tmoslty Bidu Sayao and maybe throw in some Victoria de Los Angeles.
I know, I know complicated, but it has some kind of backwards flamenco logic if you can go there. 
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Date Mar. 16 2016 5:42:22
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