Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Carruth
Louie:
You are certainly correct in saying that you have to consider the whole system in talking about both the sound of the instrument and the stress on the parts. That's not what I'm asking.
What I have been trying to do is isolate the torque force, the stress on the top, from the strain, the way the top deforms. Altering the braces, or any of a number of other details, will change the strain for a given stress, and also change the sound, of course. Taking a Martin with 'straight' braces and scalloping them changes both the way the top distorts and the tone. Different people might have varying opinions as to whether the change was an 'improvement', and worth the structural risk. It is also quite possible to make guitars with different bracing that will show the same strain under the given stress. On that line, I've built a close 'tonal copy' of an older Martin in which the top bracing was actually not very similar to the original. It was not 'identical' in sound, of course: having tried to make copies that sound alike I'm wondering if that's even possible, but it was 'close enough' for a very picky customer. I remember working on the repair of a nice Classical guitar some years ago that amazed us by being ladder braced. It sounded like many of the better fan-braced tops I've run into. So there's no direct 'pipeline' from any particular bracing scheme and tone except in a very general sense, with lots of exceptions.
What I was trying to address was your initial remark: "It is the torque on the top from the string's "pull" on the bridge that gives us the sound of the modern x-braced steel string flat-top guitar." This seems to imply that it is a torquewise vibration of the bridge under varying string tension that produces most of the sound. Maybe that's not what you meant to say, but it's a common model that I believe is incorrect, and I wanted to address that, if that, indeed, was what you were trying to say.
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Alan, I didn't mean to cause confusion. While I agree that different systems can produce results that are very close, I personally wouldn't pursue a different method unless I achieved a
different result. Otherwise I'm just reinventing the wheel. Again.
If I'm not mistaken, ladder bracing has been around since gut-string lutes, so I don't necessarily find it odd to see in a "modern" instrument. It just may well be a viable option depending on the repertoire of the player. But to say one guitar sounds just as good as another or better does not mean that they sound or play the same.
As to the quote in question - the speed of my thoughts are far greater than the 120wpm or so that I can type. Especially at 11pm! But it is that whole system - bridge, x-brace, bridge plate, finger braces, pins, saddle, body depth,,, and all their dimensions - that creates the sounds we are familiar with. Surely, there is probably a lot of latitude within those parameters