Don, I have never experienced the dulling of the bass string sound that you describe as it is brought up to pitch. Usually, it sounds better and better as it arrives close to its designed tension. Maybe we should add some unevenness to the copper by banging on it with a hammer so some waves in the tone develop. Beats in unisons and octaves seem to be in vogue on the List this month =:) (Actually, a tip of the hat to those who take the trouble to THINK about this important topic - I'm afraid to write in too much and get onto the dreaded Frequent Posters List!) I'd like to say a little more about the following question you had... Donald Mitchell wrote: > > On a related question. If it is desired to decrease the tention on a > piano wire would a smaller or larger gauge wire be used? > The answer would have to be prefaced with "All other things being equal.." This is important in that we must be thinking of the wires having the same speaking length and bringing them up to the same pitch. If the same pitch is desired, a smaller diameter wire would require less tension. To pursue this further, if you are thinking of plain wires and are wondering about strings that seem to break as you pull them up, I recall generally (from studying scales using the Thomma-Fenner slide rule and the accompanying string tables) that when calculating 'percentage of breaking point', wire size did not make a difference - it is speaking length that determines whether a wire will get up to pitch without breaking. Think a thicker wire will prevent breakage? No...if you put a thicker wire on a note to prevent it from breaking, you have to put additional tension on it to get it up to pitch and you will be at just about the same % of BP as you were with the thinner wire. You can't change % of BP of plain wires by varying the wire size. If you use a thinner wire so that not as much tension is needed to bring it up to a given pitch, that thinner wire has a lower breaking point and at the same pitch, it, too, would be at about the same % of BP. But since you started the above with "on a related question," perhaps you are thinking of bass strings. They are more complex. Variables include overall diameter (copper plus core wire) which determines the tension needed to bring the bass string up to a particular pitch and core wire diameter which will determine the % of BP of that bass string. These components can be manipulated in various ways: larger outer diameter will require more tension to bring the string up to pitch and stess the core wire more, increasing the % of BP of the core wire. Use the same outer diameter, but use a bigger core wire and less copper and the % of BP will be less for that bigger core wire. Varying the unwrapped ends of a bass string is also a factor. Then comes the end product: how does the bass string sound? Bass string design is fascinating. > Last of all when attempting to use universal bass string replacements for > brroken bass strings what kind of compensation should be made to > compensate for the fact that universal strings have a hexoginal shaped > core and normal wire has a round core. Is this difference significent? As for hexoganal core wire of universal strings, normally we don't worry about the small difference between the hex and round shapes. The above factors of ratio of copper to core are much more important and usually we just measure the overall outer diameter of a universal without regard to these other factors, so using a universal is not the optimal solution anyway. Didn't mean to ramble on so much, but this is a favorite topic of mine. Joel Rappaport Round Rock, Texas
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