[pianotech] Drilled capo bars

[John Delacour]

At 11:24 -0600 10/03/2011, Daniel Carlton wrote:


>Anyone care to say anything about drilled capo bars? Has anyone 
>besides manufacturers tried this, and had success or not? How 
>exactly is it supposed to contribute to "exceptionally long 
>sustain?" By removing mass from the bar/giving the bar more freedom 
>to vibrate? I'm not an engineer...

The whole idea of a capo bar is that it should be massive and 
immovable.  This mass and immovability is critical in the extreme 
treble, where many makers do use a cast-in front bridge (capo). 
Makers who use agraffes almost always used a special more massive 
agraffe for the top two sections and good results can be had with 
those.  The bar has several advantages over the agraffe but in all 
cases is far more massive than it needs to be to perform its 
function, simply because it's convenient to cast it that way. 
Drilling holes in it ( and I've never seen or hear of such a thing) 
is not going to  reduce the mass to anywhere near the critical level 
and is not going to make a scrap of difference to the function of the 
bridge as a massive immovable termination that absorbs no energy from 
the string.   Perhaps they think it looks pretty.

JD