On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 4:00 AM, Martyn Hodgson <hodgsonmar...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > > > Perhaps you are, in practice, actually pulling it sideways which is the > usual way of raising the pitch as, indeed, someone else has already > mentioned. Sideways movement is effectively independent of fret size > which is the point of discussion. >
There is no reason to suspect that pulling and pushing strings to change pitch involve any lateral movement at all, regardless of now "usual" it may be. This is an historical approach to adjusting pitch, and is described in period sources, none of which do I have at hand right now. The pull or push is axial, may have a minute effect between the finger and fingerboard friction is you're actually pushing the string that far (which would infer an even more minute change in tension due to the twist around the center of rotation) but generally the finger doesn't push hard against the fingerboard when pushing or pulling axially for pitch. I use the technique on viol, lute and even guitar (nylon:mostly, but it even works on that pesky bottom string on the cheap acoustic, which is so sharp at the third fret that it makes my ears melt!) It is quite different from bending strings, which involves lateral motion and ocasionally lateral motion at two points. Ray To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
