> Ideally, all of them. But it's difficult if not impossible on existing > bridges and you have to make compromises. That's the nature of my question. > When forced to compromise, what do people prefer. I tend to emphasize > tension. The Z effect is not always consistent and (soundboard and end of > bridge effects aside) I'm not sure why. Because soundboard and end of bridge effects are not aside. That's why. They are real factors that need to be considered. We may not be able to entirely adjust for these things in string scaling, but we do need to be aware that to a real degree, they exist, and we cannot. This makes beating our heads against the wall recreational, rather than a despair reaction, since we already knew the limitations of the process going in. Just like we can't fix all tone production problems with hammer voicing (which we know by trial), and we can't fix all soundboard assembly impedance and geometry problems with scaling (which we discover at some expense), or all rim and belly rigidity problems with a new rib scale (which we learn at much greater expense, and some bloodshed). >As Ron mentioned, when you can lay > it out from scratch, you can achieve a smooth curve with all three. Yes, and come to savor the difference between mistakes made by yourself, and those made my someone else. The greatest of which is that you have the chance of discovering and minimizing those made by yourself before they are rendered in hardware. This is a blessing hard to describe to those that don't build from scratch, but immediately understood by those that do. Ron N
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