On Oct 1, 2009, at 1:18 AM, PAULREVENKOJONES at aol.com wrote: > > I grant the polished profile from various recommended treatments > looks wonderful, and probably is an ideal to aim at. But how much > time is it really worth? > As much as you want to spend on perfecting the system. Obvious there > is a point of diminishing returns, where the perfect gets in the way > of the optimal. In your experimentation, what are you comparing? The near perfect with the raw? Or gradations in between as well? If the latter, the results would have much more use in the real world. > After all, the capo is probably more pitted and scratched, looked at > through a microscope, than a badly chattered agraffe hole. > No, just different shapes. It's brass after all, under same stresses > and strains as the capo. I'm quite surprised that there isn't > significantly more noise from the agraffes. If there is less noise than you would expect from what you see microscopically, doesn't that mean that the "practical optimal" level of perfection might well be lower than what you are recommending? > And those terminations are far more critical, it seems to me. > Interesting differentiation. Slippery slope, too. :-) Well, the entire instrument represents a slippery slope. Every single component is compromised in some way. There are any number of aspects that could be better. Tuning pins held by friction in a wooden block? How utterly archaic and crude! Just to give a single instance. But wouldn't you agree that the agraffe sections are less critical than the capo sections? That we experience far more problems and unmet expectations in the latter? So why obsess over terminations in the area that is less problematic? (Not to say that agraffes don't sometimes present very obvious problems - it is merely a question of degree). Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico fssturm at unm.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20091001/1a3f346a/attachment.htm>
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