Brown's lengths

[Ron Nossaman]

I read with some interest, the comments in this month's PTJ about Richard
Brown's series of articles "Some Thoughts on the Design of Bass Strings". I
was disappointed that the speaking lengths weren't given to round out the
picture a little. Not having the real info, and being me, I decided to see
how the back door approach worked. I plugged the diameters of the cores and
wraps into a scaling program and juggled the lengths until the tensions and
breaking percentages came into line with the published chart. Extremely
spooky scale! Not recommended. This still doesn't tell us what the rest of
the scale looked like, and I seriously doubt that it was a straight log
progression, so it's not really good for much. Still, I think it's a good
enough reconstruction to illustrate the problems inherent in this kind of
approach to bass scaling. 

Try these lengths, in millimeters, and see what you get. 

1  1238
2  1225
3  1212
4  1200
5  1188
6  1177
7  1160
8  1149
9  1135
10 1122
11 1108
12 1096
13 1083
14 1073
15 1060
16 1049
17 1035
18 1022
19 1010
20 999
21 984
22 972
23 959
24 948
25 933
26 920
27 1065
28 1050
29 1032
30 1016

For what it's worth, 
 Ron