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Re: Old guitar strings




On Thu, 23 Oct 1997 15:33:04 -0400 "GARY HEMMINGER"
<Hemmig@d-e.pvt.k12.nj.us> writes:
I'm curious about the causes of aging in guitar strings.
Guitarists, and the rest of us as well, can easily distinguish
quality of an old string from a new one. Some pros change their
strings weekly.
With nylon, I can see that there is a definite physical change in the
string, since nylon will stretch quite a bit with use. In fact, my
friend who is an
expert flamenco guitarist will fine tune strings which are a bit
sharp by stretching them, and this seems to be a rather permanent
deformation. I don't believe that anyone does this with steel
strings. So if the permanent deformation of a steel string is
considerably less than that of nylon, then why do they seem to go
sour just as fast?
An additional question is, why do piano strings last so long? To my
knowledge they are rarely changed.
I'm wonedering what the mechanosm could be here, and the only other
thought I have is that oil and dirt from the fingers may have an
effect. I have read that one should wipe down steel strings after
use, and of course piano strings aren't ever touched. Any
thoughts?

*****************************************
Gary Hemminger
Dwight-Engelwood School
315 E. Palisade Ave.
Englewood, New Jersey
07631
e-mail: hemmig@d-e.pvt.k12.nj.us
********************************************

Without consulting Helmholtz or Lord Rayleigh (Billy Strutt) or anyone,
it occurs to me that the coil wound piano strings might be somewhat more
stable than guitar strings, but the treble strings in groups of three do
require a little attention from time to time and many piano player own a
tuning 'hammer' and a few rubber dampers. If at least one of the three
is still in tune, it is easy to tune the other two; and, with constant
attention, at least one of three will be in tune still. In some cases,
one's hearing is so bad up there that one does not notice the difficulty.
Most pianos should be tuned once a week and, conceivably, before every
use. In my experience, and I have very bad hearing (so where do I get
off making theoretical remarks about popular music most of which
(remarks) I am passing along from experts), most pianos are noticeably
badly tuned, which does not take very good hearing to observe as the
beats are quite audible. (Nevertheless, I prefer a slightly out of tune
acoustic piano-forte to the electric kind, which is what I can afford to
play nowadays. Also, I would like to take this opportunity to make an
observation about musical acoustics and rock and roll; namely, when we
derive the wave equation for a string we assume tangent theta equals
theta, which is true for infinitesimal displacements and good enough for
small displacements but not at all true for most rock and roll.
Therefore, musical acoustics (at the beginning (linear) level) does not
apply to rock and roll!!!

Also, a thought about the piano occurred to me when I first read this (I
am 300 letters behind). The ICs for a piano are displacement zero,
velocity nonzero; for a guitar, the opposite. This difference may bear
on the original question.

Regards / The Dilettante