Spreadsheet info / Jason Kanter

[RicB]

Hi folks

As you know Jason and a few friends are working on a spreadsheet for 
designing scales to share with the entire list.  He / we are trying to 
include a few specialized automation features and one of them is proving 
a bit challenging.  The idea is to try to provide some kind of way of 
automatically evening out tension as much as possible while maintaining 
a resonable string length curve and string diameters.  Interestingly... 
the first attempts which floated diameters only when tension was all 
alligneed to an exact value....  resulted in a really weird (by usual 
standards) set of string diameters... with hops up and down in size all 
over the place.  Inharmonicity was not looked at (yet).

Questions that arise have to do with what kind of range for variance in 
tension to scale designers typically operate with, and ... then I was 
wondering what really would be so bad about a scale that had diameters 
not necessarilly decreasing in size evenly up the scale... what would be 
wrong with a more ... jagged curve ?

Jason is putting a lot of effort into this so any feedback would be 
greatly appreciated.  Any old scales you have stored for studying should 
be sent along to him.

Cheers
RicB