Loudness vs.string tension

[Anders Buen]

19 hours ago, LCF said:

I have sometimes wondered if the understrings are a complex set of wolf eliminators?

It is possible. However, it is a custom to play the fiddles before the understrings comes on and wolves have never appeared in my small shop. There are players with a very fast and energetic bow, like Hallvard T Bjørgum. If a wolf appears it would be under his bow. The HF playing thechnique is normally «softer» and more even than what can be done on violins using trained classic playing techniques. And the bridge is flatter, so the angle of attack on the top is flatter. The top is flatter too across the top in the bridge area.

The strings are lighter gauges gut, loosesly overwound gut, or with dense silver. The gauge can be changed and are available up to 12 I think. I use 10,5 which is the next lightest, allowing for higher tuning.

There are other HF makers on this site, so maybe they have experiences to share? E.g. @Salve Håkedal 

[LCF]

1 hour ago, Anders Buen said:

It is possible. However, it is a custom to play the fiddles before the understrings comes on and wolves have never appeared in my small shop. There are players with a very fast and energetic bow, like Hallvard T Bjørgum. If a wolf appears it would be under his bow. The HF playing thechnique is normally «softer» and more even than what can be done on violins using trained classic playing techniques. And the bridge is flatter, so the angle of attack on the top is flatter. The top is flatter too across the top in the bridge area.

The strings are lighter gauges gut, loosesly overwound gut, or with dense silver. The gauge can be changed and are available up to 12 I think. I use 10,5 which is the next lightest, allowing for higher tuning.

There are other HF makers on this site, so maybe they have experiences to share? E.g. @Salve Håkedal 

Hi Anders, not wanting to veer off the topic too far but I made my first rough HF when I was a teenager after being loaned a record of Sigbjørn Bernhoft Osa. I took the neck off a German trade fiddle and made a neck for it with a straight 8 peg pegbox. I had a lot of fun but wasn't connected with any traditional players or makers, or even Norwegian people. They tended to keep a low profile here, but probably I did that before you were born!

Back on topic: I'm thinking about the light soundboard/light stringing approach versus one of the other instruments I play, gadulka. That has three mains and 10 sympathies and goes to the other extreme with very heavy strings and very heavy soundboard, and a through post like Marty's violas. The top string looks like piano wire. It's not a quiet instrument! I played acoustically with other unamplified instruments for a dance in a room with about 100 people dancing around us.

So there's that for a data point. 

Marty, how about making a d'Amore small viola version with a few symps? I'd like to see you pull that off with your neck+fingerboard+tail combination. 

I deliberately did not say small Viola d'Amore there.

 

 

[Anders Buen]

1 hour ago, LCF said:

Back on topic: I'm thinking about the light soundboard/light stringing approach versus one of the other instruments I play, gadulka. That has three mains and 10 sympathies and goes to the other extreme with very heavy strings and very heavy soundboard, and a through post like Marty's violas. The top string looks like piano wire. It's not a quiet instrument! I played acoustically with other unamplified instruments for a dance in a room with about 100 people dancing around us.

So there's that for a data point. 

100 people in the same room dancing to HF can happen, but they probably rely on the steps from the other dancers and the player sat in the middle of the crowd.

Im 54, so you are probaly not much older than me. It is a fair chance that I made my first before you did. 

[LCF]

31 minutes ago, Anders Buen said:

100 people in the same room dancing to HF can happen, but they probably rely on the steps from the other dancers and the player sat in the middle of the crowd.

Im 54, so you are probaly not much older than me. It is a fair chance that I made my first before you did. 

When you were 2 y.o.?  

[VicM]

On 4/6/2024 at 1:25 PM, iNeedAnswers said:

I am not a violin maker, but I am a theoretical physicist who modells similar stuff for many years now. 

I am sorry to be that harsh, but that is a huge pile of bs bingo. A crude undercomplex model by someone obviously not trained in that field. We could start at the difference between spring like behavior and elasticity, two very different things. You basically try to condense the complexity of 4d into 1d, tensors into linear equations, a dynamic system into a semi static.......

I am not a maths person but I was told tensors are a shorthand for linear equations with very specific properties.

[iNeedAnswers]

15 minutes ago, VicM said:

I am not a maths person but I was told tensors are a shorthand for linear equations with very specific properties.

No, well yes, they can be used in such manner and often are, but generally speaking they describe a multiset of dependencies. They can be understood as multidimensional arrays, but that is only one way of working with them, admittedly the most common one in physics. In those arrays we usually have multilinear dependencies and in specific forms they can be used to solve a set of linear equations. Another way is to look at it as levels of generalization, where the tensor would be the third level from a linear equation.
No question, they are related to each other, but so are 1d, 2d, 3d and 4d, quite comparably, actually. 

 

  

23 hours ago, Aston4 said:

Oh!!!!!

Welcome to this terrible thread!

Please, if you enjoy sighing and shaking your head and muttering under your breath:

Could you please go back earlier in this thread and see where I quoted some equations and a paper purporting to model the behavior of strings?  My physics education was undergraduate, simplistic, and now mostly forgotten.

Can you explain what is missing in those models, and whether they can be improved?

Sorry about the terrible posting limitation of this board, I think it goes away after 10 posts.

I would not call it terrible
I will read it out of my own interest as well. At very first glance, it seems to simplify quite a bit, but I would prefer to look at its derivation over reverse engineering before I answer. I am currently limited to two posts per day, but that should be over soon, so maybe I even do three.

[Anders Buen]

1 hour ago, LCF said:

When you were 2 y.o.?  

That was before memory started to work properly. I have three generations of makers in the family before me.

[Dr. Mark]

10 minutes ago, VicM said:

I am not a maths person but I was told tensors are a shorthand for linear equations with very specific properties.

Hi VicM.  We may not want to get into it much here - the Wiki page presentation is pretty good if you're willing to read carefully and become familiar with the definitions and notation.  Keep in mind that iNeedAnswers is pontificating with the purpose of expressing his knowledge and deriding Reguz for his misconceptions, while there are a number of good math/physics sites written with the intent to explain.

[LCF]

5 minutes ago, Anders Buen said:

That was before memory started to work properly. I have three generations of makers in the family before me.

A family tradition like that is an extremely precious thing. 

[David Burgess]

21 minutes ago, Dr. Mark said:

Keep in mind that iNeedAnswers is pontificating with the purpose of expressing his knowledge and deriding Reguz for his misconceptions, while there are a number of good math/physics sites written with the intent to explain.

While some of INeedAnswers' response was over my head, I did appreciate his description of,  uhm, a certain person's concepts as " a huge pile of bs bingo".

[VicM]

2 hours ago, Dr. Mark said:

Hi VicM.  We may not want to get into it much here - the Wiki page presentation is pretty good if you're willing to read carefully and become familiar with the definitions and notation.  Keep in mind that iNeedAnswers is pontificating with the purpose of expressing his knowledge and deriding Reguz for his misconceptions, while there are a number of good math/physics sites written with the intent to explain.

I would not be able to read it. I initially qualified as a professional cello/piano player. I then studied economics and work now in a related field. Was good idea, it put food on my table consistently. The reply I wrote was at the request of a former colleague who knows these things backwards. And one of my daughters is a senior research mathematician and she also knows a bit. I asked my daughter about the wikipedia page and she said it is better to avoid it. 

[VicM]

3 hours ago, iNeedAnswers said:

No, well yes, they can be used in such manner and often are, but generally speaking they describe a multiset of dependencies. They can be understood as multidimensional arrays, but that is only one way of working with them, admittedly the most common one in physics. In those arrays we usually have multilinear dependencies and in specific forms they can be used to solve a set of linear equations. Another way is to look at it as levels of generalization, where the tensor would be the third level from a linear equation.
No question, they are related to each other, but so are 1d, 2d, 3d and 4d, quite comparably, actually. 

From that it looks like you have no idea what you talking about. I will ask former member here to explain and I will PM you the explanation. Maybe youneedanswers.  My advice to you is to not beat the scientific drum here because some of the people who read, KNOW.

[David Burgess]

21 minutes ago, VicM said:

I will ask former member here to explain and I will PM you the explanation.

Wouldn't it be better if you would publicly post the explanation along with the person who contributed it? Many of us have a lot of experience with various people in the fiddle business, and a lot of experience with former posters here. Would you like to deprive us of the benefits of our experience? If so, why?

[Deo Lawson]

Heavy strings are louder. This is why all the modern synthetics are going tighter, tighter, tighter...

 

Think about steel strings: highest tension with the most mass per unit length. We all know steel strings are the loudest, from experience. A nylon string guitar cannot come close to a steel string, for example.

[VicM]

46 minutes ago, David Burgess said:

Wouldn't it be better if you would publicly post the explanation along with the person who contributed it? Many of us have a lot of experience with various people in the fiddle business, and a lot of experience with former posters here. Would you like to deprive us of the benefits of our experience? If so, why?

I did not know you miss Stross so much but if he's doesn't mind I am fine with it.

[David Burgess]

26 minutes ago, Deo Lawson said:

We all know steel strings are the loudest, from experience.

Some are, some are not. A lot depends on the specifics of how they are constructed, and whether or not they will be used with a magnetic pickup.

[David Burgess]

27 minutes ago, VicM said:

I did not know you miss Stross so much but if he's doesn't mind I am fine with it.

 I don't miss him, but thank you. That gives me a lot of his prior posting history to go on, should he remotely render a more recent opinion.

[VicM]

17 minutes ago, David Burgess said:

 I don't miss him, but thank you. That gives me a lot of his prior posting history to go on, should he remotely render a more recent opinion.

Will see. Ha says for the next few days is placing new bearings for his engine. Joke aside I also want a good explanation for Fourier series. We did some in the maths for economics  but I never understood. I will suggest some patience.

[Dr. Mark]

3 hours ago, VicM said:

I asked my daughter about the wikipedia page and she said it is better to avoid it [Wiki].

Granted it's best to listen to your daughter.

[Dr. Mark]

3 hours ago, VicM said:

From that it looks like you have no idea what you talking about. [to iNeedAnswers]

You may consider:

V: Who? Who is but the form following the function of what, and what I am is a man in a mask.

Since you said that you're not a math person, and indicated that you don't know what tensors are, how can you judge if you're looking at a mask, i.e. the validity of statements made about them?

Evey: Well, I can see that.

V: Of course you can. I”m not questioning your powers of observation, I”m merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is.

...or in our case, remarking on the paradox of someone who has admitted lacking knowledge asserting that statements about tensors and tensor algebra are true or false.

1 hour ago, VicM said:

We did some in the maths for economics  but I never understood

Where does the problem arise?  It might be something easily rectified.

[VicM]

56 minutes ago, Dr. Mark said:

Since you said that you're not a math person, and indicated that you don't know what tensors are, how can you judge if you're looking at a mask, i.e. the validity of statements made about them?

 

From the opinion and explanations of actual experts. Like the Courts work.  I am not a maths person but we studied Analysis I & II,  little Complex Analysis and to intermediate level we did Linear Algebra. We did  lot of statistics. I remember little but I still have the idea what is  vector space,  multi-linear form and what is dual of the vector space. At the time of my studies for economics I put a lot of efforts in this things as I was coming from music education. And I received a hand written note from Stross with the algebraic definition and how the components change and the product. But I can not follow the notation with all those Einstein sumations. 

[VicM]

1 hour ago, Dr. Mark said:

Where does the problem arise?  It might be something easily rectified.

I do not know. I did not understand at that time and now a long time has passed since. I studied Economics in Eastern Europe ( Romania ) and they way they presented everything was as abstract as possible. When she was in University and she was studying maths my daughter could not read or understand my first years statistics course. So abstract. We mostly memorized everything text and exercises mechanically to get the grade and pass. 

[LCF]

4 hours ago, David Burgess said:

 and whether or not they will be used with a magnetic pickup.

That's cheating! 

I recall several concerts of classical guitars unplugged which could be heard in concert halls, very clearly and note by note eg the brothers Abreu, Paco Peña, Slava Grigoryan, many many more, but not so much any unamplified steel string guitars, not with such complex music anyway. Diz Disley maybe? Playing a very different type of steel string to run of the mill.

 

Which drags this discussion kicking and screaming back closer to the OP  in that there are qualities of tone and styles of playing which carry in ways that are different to a simplistic idea of loudness.

 

Discuss.

[LCF]

47 minutes ago, VicM said:

I do not know. I did not understand at that time and now a long time has passed since. I studied Economics in Eastern Europe ( Romania ) and they way they presented everything was as abstract as possible. When she was in University and she was studying maths my daughter could not read or understand my first years statistics course. So abstract. We mostly memorized everything text and exercises mechanically to get the grade and pass. 

I think of tensors not very often, but if I do they seem to be data structures the elements of which can either be simple data or other data structures including algorithms, recursively. And if you had some specific tensors in your hand, metaphorically speaking you would need to have the right size and shape of algorithmic spanners to be able to repair them or bolt them together, together with a large amount of mathematical glue and appropriate lubricants.

You could borrow some of that from a passing physicist or even an engineer. 

 

 

[martin swan]

5 hours ago, Deo Lawson said:

 

Think about steel strings: highest tension with the most mass per unit length. We all know steel strings are the loudest, from experience. A nylon string guitar cannot come close to a steel string, for example.

I don't think anyone told Paco de Lucia!

Strings don't produce sound until they are strung on an instrument, so then we have to contend with how the particular structure of the instrument withstands a given string tension and what the player can do with strings at a given tension.