Kurt, although I'm not a builder, please allow me to share my own experiences on this.
I've had several guitars over the years on which I've experimented with gauges. Not all of them were completely traditional handbuilt guitars, and at this point, most of the all-wood guitars have been cleared out.
Over all those years of experimenting, on my all-wood guitars, on my Ovations, my Hohner Eclipse 12-string (that odd woven birch laminate bowlback they made), and on my Rainsongs, I've done experimenting to see what was the best stringing, judged by the sound coming from the instrument. Since I was working in a music store in the '80s, it was easy to order bulk strings for me, as easy as it is now with the internet. I also was fortunate to have resources for calculating string tensions, and I never took experimental sets to a higher total tension than the sets the instruments were built for.
All the guitars wound up sounding better with that parabolic arc of tension you notice, instead of straight or progressive tensioning. For me, it never even got to a question of strangely distributed string tensions, because I kept coming back to the norm for acoustic guitars.
Isn't that strange?
|