Concerning vibration of the string. We did some experiments at a recent meeting of the Northern California Association of Luthiers regarding how a string vibrates immediately after it is plucked. If you pluck in the middle of string it immediately vibrates at its fundimental frequency, plus the usual overtones of fifths and thirds which occur a fraction of a second later. But no-one plucks at the center of the string. If you pluck close to the bridge the string vibrates first at the distance from the bridge to where you are plucking, then almost immediately at a point the same distance from the nut. Then within a minute fraction of a second it vibrates as if the string were open from the finger to the bridge. The reason for the experiment was to work out how to prevent fret rattle, but the same physics applies whether you shorten the sounding length with a finger against a fret or a steel bar. You change the overtones by where you pluck the string, and this can be heard quite plainly.

Agreed, most standard guitarists spend very little time exciting the string(s) at the 12th fret, but as they progress up the neck, they will spend more time exciting the string at it's halfway point.

Can you say how you approached the measurements that you used for your experiments = equipment et al?

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Bobby Lee (a.k.a. b0b) - email: quasar@b0b.com - gigs - CDs, Open Hearts
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[This message was edited by b0b on 21 July 2006 at 09:38 AM.]

Not sure if I was conveying my thought well earlier, but I was trying for something like your statement of holding the shape of the graph is more important than the exact shape. It is however intertwined with exactly how you define sustain, is it better to have the overtones die off before the fundamentals or all freqs decaying equally?

If the graph were exactly the the same at 0,2,4,8 seconds that would be similar to holding down keys on an organ (for something like a B3 sound without modulation). Keyboardists would call this sustain I guess.

If you took the organ example and decreased the volume over the 8 seconds, you would get the same shape repeated lower as time passed, it would look like a ladder.

If you took the organ example, decreased the volume, and applied a volume controlled lowpass filter over the 8 seconds, you would get graphs similar to the steel graphs.

With the new graphs, I noticed another trend.

All the graphs show that most all the steels have a bright attack (not surprising given most are maple body, maple is well known for bright attack).

Note that the Beast and the other Sierra 14 tend toward more uniform graph shapes, since the are completely different in construction material (ie aluminum body), perhaps that is not a surprise.

Graphs of other materials of construction would be interesting to compare…..

Whatever conclusions you draw this is interesting stuff.

[This message was edited by Scott Swartz on 21 July 2006 at 12:58 PM.]