MIMF

Weight is a consideration, for balance reasons - basses tend to be neck heavy, and lighter tuners can help with that. On the other hand, there is something be said for high mass at the string ends, as it increases mechanical impedance, thereby marginally increasing sustain. "Mechanical Impeden...

Hello. I am trying to select tuning machine heads for an electric bass. They really vary in price. I wonder how much they affect the tone, but I can't find information on this. I find info about "upgrading" tuners, but is tone the reason for this? If I want to go cheap, I would get these o...

Update: I found here that Rock West Composites standard modulus carbon fiber is 33 Msi, and that this is a measure of "tensile modulus". However, I don't know if Aloft Hobbies has the same or lower. When I ordered from Aloft Hobbies, I felt like probably any carbon fiber would be good enou...

I bought these carbon fiber rods from Aloft Hobbies . They are 1mm×6mm×1m. While I realize that 1mm is quite thin, and that they resist flexing better in the 6mm dimension, they are still less stiff than I expected. Here is a video of me wobbling it in the 1mm dimension. However, I am able to slight...

.. but I find a lot less than that to start to feel floppy, a lot more than that starts to be overly stiff for my taste. Brian Do you mean "a lot less than that thickness/tension of strings" being floppy, or are you referring to the neck being floppy? I think I have a pretty good idea of ...

I am making two electric stringed instruments of my own design. One of them is a 2-string instrument with a 22"/56cm scale length, with strings tuned to A3 & D4. The second is a 4-string instrument with a 18"/46cm scale length. I haven't decided the tuning for the second one, but the l...

Moderately long (40") overwound strings can be had from those who sell Harp guitar strings - www. Harpguitarmusic.com Thank you. 40" is a relatively long scale length, but not enough to be classified as a "long string instrument". True long-string instruments are never handheld,...

I want to make an instrument with doubled courses. But I want to have one string at a higher action than the other, so that the string below is a semi-sympathetic string. By "semi-sympathetic" I mean that it resonates with the other string instead of being struck directly (like a sympathet...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_Cwe_pz0Uo Here is a very good video of some Japanese ukulele enthusiasts visit to Aquila strings (captions in hiragana). Correction: The subtitles are written in Japanese; a combination of the Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji alphabets. I can read kana myself, but not ...

I believe you have to draw the line somewhere. My line is building everything except for strings and tuning machines, and most of my tools. However, I do make my own jigs and guitar specific tools. You're right that a line must be drawn somewhere. But would winding the strings really take more work...

Has anyone here ever tried winding their own strings? https://youtu.be/YbizZatTilU https://youtu.be/4_MVOZnhLVc Seeing those videos, I suppose it wouldn't be terribly difficult to make a string winder and wind some strings with wire if you didn't mind it being rough, although it would likely take si...

I buy my carbon reinforcement strips from DragonPlate which sells them in 48" lengths. Thank you. I will probably buy them from there now. Although I appreciate the help from Barry Daniels, I really meant for this discussion to be about the general idea rather than my specific instrument. My i...

I'm sorry for being so late to reply to these. Part of a piano's sound comes from the fact that the hammer strikes each string at the 7th harmonic node in an effort to eliminate that particular harmonic from the sound. Plucking a guitar at that point should do something similar. Thank you. That is g...

I much applaud your willingness to create something untraditional like this. I will be happy to see it. Seeing projects like this is what I live for. The hurdy-gurdy is an interesting instrument, and it's surprising that there aren't more instruments that borrow it's wheel feature to drive the strin...

I know that typically, neck reinforcement rods and truss rods only run through the neck, but not the body of the instrument. This is roughly the length of the fingerboard. This even includes neck-through guitars (like the one shown below), in which there's one solid piece of wood running the entire ...

I'm building an instrument which doesn't fit into any existing category, but it's closest to a semi-hollow body fretless bass guitar than anything, although it will probably be played upright. I was going to build it without an adjustable truss rod, and use a square steel tube and maybe some carbon ...

What construction differences between Piano's and Guitar-family instruments contribute to their different sound? I'm especially interested in the bass notes. Here is what the bass notes on an upright piano sound like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1bPQ2z5pec Very different from the same notes on ...

I feel lucky to run into this on my first look at this forum. "Microtonal music software for Linux" is an obscure topic, but I have been frustrated by the lack of it. So it's nice to unexpectedly find someone that shares the interest. I have this repository for a fork of Qsynth in which I ...