----- Original Message ----- From: "Stuart Walsh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <lute@cs.dartmouth.edu> Sent: Saturday, January 27, 2007 1:34 PM Subject: [LUTE] a couple of questions about home-made bridges
> ... Would it be better to have a bridge with a > bigger area - for a stronger joint and more area to transmit sound? (But > early guitars have small bridges?) Good question, Stuart. It all really depends on the quality of your instrument and how 'authentically' it's constructed. So in your case (as of your mentioning of 'an inexpensive oud') it won't probably be so terribly important if the bridge is wider than 'normal'. Whether the bridge and its gluing area is bigger or smaller, it would have no difference on the amount of energy of the vibrating string that is transmitted to the soundboard. What is more important is its mass. Slimmer / lighter bridge will result in rising the frequency of some particular modes of vibrating soundboard, while fatter / heavier bridge to lowering those modes. Or, in other words, lighter bridge will enhance higher frequencies, heavier one - lower. Instrument with a lighter bridge will also be quicker to respond to a plucked string, with a heavier - slower. Old makers have probably arrived at some optimum parameters of bridges on lutes and guitars purely empirically, aiming at what works best for the sort of sound they and / or their customers favoured most. Those bridges are, as a rule, rather slim and made of sufficiently dense but lighter varieties of wood (fruit woods seem to be mostly common). So the best approach would be to follow the examples of such surviving original bridges (not so many of them unfortunately). And by fitting 'inappropriately' proportioned bridge to either old instrument or authentically constructed new one it's perfectly possible to virtually ruin their sound! Alexander To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
