Driving the output with a square wave means you can only really get the loudest string at any one time, but using a proper audio amplifier that isn’t saturated should be able to keep the nuance of lower loudness strings all summed onto one another. Also you can just turn guitar pickups sideways.
Mate I am so sorry to bother you again. I had a really good thought, something only possible without need for wind or a performer. I was thinking about adding reverb and amplification without runaway feedback, came to the idea of an amp driven spring reverb, with a soundboard instead of an 'out' transducer, in another box. Here's the thought - the limiting factor on the soundboard is the mass needed to supply the strength to hold up the bridge against the force of the strings. How about you significantly reduce the force on the soundboard by holding the bridge up, at least in part, with springs. At the other end of those springs, another acoustic resonator, another soundboard with holes on a box, adding to the overall output and physically feeding resonances back into the bridge. It doesn't have to be opposite, blocking the soundboard, but held at, say, 45°. Playable, exposed springs, thinner soundboard on the harp, reverb.
@@brjplummer9415 The man likes reverb, and it suits; he can fabricate one with materials on hand; it's mechanically exciting another resonator and putting some of that energy back into the bridge, without powered amplification, adding to the acoustic energy in the room and reinforcing resonances; it might help reduce the heft of the soundboard, allowing a louder, longer excitation. Admittedly, setting it up to pull the bridge might be a royal pain in the buttocks, but he should deffo explore getting the signal into springs, attached to a soundbox. If you play a guitar with a sprung 'trem,' without plugging it in, you can hear the springs reverberate. Perhaps you could run an array of PT2399s off a signal,, a micro controller running an algorithm, but that's hardly the same thing
@@kaisersozeh7845 Perhaps the bridge can be supported by an actuator, which might sit similarly to the sound post in a violin except it would be able to lengthen slightly and drive the bridge mechanically.
Here's an idea: some strings have a significant amount of nickel, right? If you pass the string through the center of a coil, you could use the magnetostrictive effect as either a pickup or as a driver/actuator. The same could perhaps be done with a tuning peg as the "core" of a coil.
Since you know the frequency of each string, you could use a pulse width modulator (PWM) to drive the coils instead of sensing them. You need a sensor on a guitar (eBow) to figure out what note is being played, but in a drone instrument like this it isn't necessary unless you re-tune it, but I think the PWM parts will take a voltage input so you could put a pot for each coil to tune the driver to each string. You'd still need the amplifier circuit but not the input coil.
This is dope. I love how it sounds. I can imagine (perhaps unrealistically) a piano-ish instrument powered not by hammers, but by individual sustainers on each string, which you activate with a keyboard. Very cool project--thanks for sharing!
Awesomesauce my friend! I feel your struggles - a few weeks ago I rewound the coil on a balanced armature speaker/sound powered phone, matching the original as best I could. Fixing that thing had me missing the PCB rework I used to do under a microscope.
Lovely stuff! It just won't get very loud. But, given this isn't wind driven, and you won't need to accommodate a performer, you can throw out the Greek plans and play with the form to prioritise acoustic amplification. Couple of principals from 20th C guitar design - I only half remember, am not a luthier. Keep the resonating soundboard as thin as possible, a curve will help with strength - but curves are hard. The bridge needs to transfer energy from different 'impedances' of acoustic energy, so as thin and hard as you can at the string, without breaking the string, embedded firmly in something broad and flat that moves with the soundboard. Opposite the bridge, keep the (hard) nut as fixed motionless as possible, let the bridge do the work. The angle that the strings drop away from the nut and the bridge can be important, but I can't remember why...but as you are playing with form, maybe leave enough length to have a resonant frequency? Keep all the sensors and actuators as far from the middle of the soundboard, in particular the sound hole(s) as you can You can have smaller holes, of differing sizes. This might help with the placement of parts and keeping enough strength in the soundboard. What you make the box out of, essentially, doesn't matter, as long as it holds its shape and is bad at transfering the delicious energy inside. What that shape is can get complicated, but you are thinking intersecting resonators with the string/bridge intersection at the center of each resonator. There is a smaller lobe, like the hourglass of a cello has a smaller bulb at the top, but I honestly don't know how and why it is constructed. You might want to look at Dobro guitars, made of metal, designed to amplify acoustically, don't know how they work. Also, I am on a home made instrument group on facebook, maybe ask there? What ever form it takes I would stick with the idea of concentrating the sound and projecting it one direction. Looking forward to seeing where this goes, really interesting project.
@@MichaelKrzyzaniak just riffing, but as it promises to be quite quiet, would you consider experimenting with feedback? You were saying you were hearing detail through a contact mic that you couldn't hear acoustically - and you enjoyed loads of reverb in post. How about you fabricate a spring reverb, you have the means and the skills, take that electrically amplified signal and put into piezos - not on the sound board, but perhaps embedded under the nut? You might be able to avoid runaway feedback but still use the amplified signal to drive the oscillations. Exposed springs are always a plus
Sorry man, last one. It might be simpler to amplify it for a spring reverb, but instead of a transducer at the end, you attach it to another soundboard in another box. You can then (grossly) control feedback by moving the reverb box closer and further away, or by changing the amplification into the spring. Thanks for reading!
@@kaisersozeh7845Interesting ideas, I hadn't thought about this but it does make sense given how I have been thinking about the sound. I might have to try some stuff out. Thanks for watching!
For the instrument box, maybe better wood (pine?), or at least nice pine sides. You could look at how bracing works in acoustic guitars - maybe this helps with sound, I'm not sure. For the saddle and bridge, find some hard wood maybe. Good luck!
try piezo elements... they work both ways. and theres actually a huge range of different transducers available. you dont have to mount them at both ends the same way? a plain under-bridge strip pickup, and individual cylinders under the "fixed" end of the string... run a filter circuit on the feedback loop, random noise generator controlling frequency and bandwidth(q) so only one string pulls into resonance at any time... iunno... somewhere i have an old piezo based reverb unit... uses strips flexing to twist the spring somehow. bit fiddly! spring reverb use "torsional wave" transmission. reduces outside influences. seems unrelated but interesting to know... theres three waves in a string. transverse, beam, and torsional. they arent necessarily harmonically related! imho, its why certain scale lengths and string gauges work, whereas others dont... you can wriggle it up and down. the obvious "wave" of any stringed instrument. that itself breaks down into two components, XZ and YZ planes. one parallel to the bridge or "soundboard", one perpendicular. strings really "gyrate". you can bang on it end wise. the not so obvious wave at the speed of sound in the string itself reflecting end to end... and you can twist it. this is an interesting mode... theres other factors as well... placement of the pickups! stretch the poles of your pickup out with soft iron to be on both sides of the string, especially the exciters? but remember theres a nasty thing called "magnetic quench" when the fields TOO strong! that also may play a vital role in the overtone content... where the signal is being injected into the string... and thats why i prefer the piezo idea... can get it right in at the node of ALL harmonics, the fixed mount... a guitar pickup can always be mounted lengthwise, one per string... "single coil" humbuckers have really nice thin coils... i wound my own pickups years ago on bits of filed down hacksaw blade... worked quite well!
I absolutely love this. I have all sorts of ideas while watching this, but lack the knowledge to execute them. But as a long time ebow and sustainer pickup player, I wonder how this would sound with wound strings (E A Ds from a guitar set). My experience is the wound, slightly larger gauge strings are more magnetically enthusiastic, at least initially. I mean, they usually are quicker to react than single wire strings. The downside is, they can get a little unwieldy with too much power, but the random harmonic overtones can be super cool! ps. I'm really digging my metal marsh mic....i think I need another for stereo recording.
Yess! I just discovered this yesterday, I was playing around with my 7-string and the low strings go crazy. I definitely want play around with this some more! I'm glad you like the mic
*******Reverberation NATURALLY could be achieved by placing 2 to 6 lengthy springs (tunable/tighten/loosenable at one end of anchor and placing the lot withing the Larger Sound Body of instrument. I've done this to a few of my Acoustic Guitar builds!. To also help this Journey look at the Science of vibrations of a string and how it breaks up into it's overtones etc. the best production to these vibrations are dead center between nut and bridge(half distance of string). Guitars are obviously limited of it's strength due to the fretboard double octave being in the way of play area. Of course, until we guitarists develop a sustaining system that can utilize a miniaturized and amplified DRIVER P.U. via Utilizing the Fret as the P.U. Slug which is located half distance between both the Nut and the Bridge. Lastly....for any Guitarist the Driver response in such a setup could pose problematic when playing Further up the neck and beyond the double octave area!*******
There's a piece of me that has been missing for several years. You remind me what that was, Mike. There is more to life than scaling the social ladder... I hope we can work together again soon.
For me it was very surprising how much there was multiple strings vibrating at once, even if it wasn't too audible without the contact mic. It sounded really nice. Maybe that could be tuned and/or controlled with some filters. The filters might not need to be too complex (basic 1-pole 6 dB/octave could work well enough) and phase shift they cause might have as big impact how it affects the feedback as the damping of the frequencies outside the passband. For building better and more resonant instrument, you might what the instrument builder channels here on youtube. It's another deep rabbit hole though. At least with guitars the acoustic volume of an instrument seems to be a bit of a balancing act between the volume and sustain. If you take energy from the vibrating string to be converted to vibrations of air... Well there will be less energy on the string to continue vibrating. Luckily, you are using an external source of energy to keep it vibrating. One thing that might also be nice is to ad asmall speaker or acoustic transducer to the instrument and feed it only a heavily reverb-processed signal. That way you could some of that ambience you had on the recording straight from the instrument itself.
Hey, thanks for the cool ideas. Filters would probably work. I've thought about doing that digitally as well - obviously that is an entire separate set of challanges, but it could be interesting to play with. The speaker idea is good too. I have some friends who put surface transducers on the back of guitars and played processed guitar sounds out of them as part of an art installation. It sounded really good! I might play around with it.
![Fulgorian Harp: [4] How to make your Aeolian Harp louder](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/axtSKvAtztE/mqdefault.jpg)
![Fulgorian Harp: [4] How to make your Aeolian Harp louder](/img/tr.png)
![Fulgorian Harp: [1] Guitar Sustainer Amplifiers](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/f75oSGKe4gM/mqdefault.jpg)
Driving the output with a square wave means you can only really get the loudest string at any one time, but using a proper audio amplifier that isn’t saturated should be able to keep the nuance of lower loudness strings all summed onto one another. Also you can just turn guitar pickups sideways.
I love you all from the bobbin of my ferrite cœur
Mate I am so sorry to bother you again. I had a really good thought, something only possible without need for wind or a performer.
I was thinking about adding reverb and amplification without runaway feedback, came to the idea of an amp driven spring reverb, with a soundboard instead of an 'out' transducer, in another box.
Here's the thought - the limiting factor on the soundboard is the mass needed to supply the strength to hold up the bridge against the force of the strings.
How about you significantly reduce the force on the soundboard by holding the bridge up, at least in part, with springs. At the other end of those springs, another acoustic resonator, another soundboard with holes on a box, adding to the overall output and physically feeding resonances back into the bridge. It doesn't have to be opposite, blocking the soundboard, but held at, say, 45°.
Playable, exposed springs, thinner soundboard on the harp, reverb.
@@kaisersozeh7845 Interesting idea!
@@kaisersozeh7845 Using a Spring reverberation unit? That is Back to the 60's again.
@@brjplummer9415 The man likes reverb, and it suits; he can fabricate one with materials on hand; it's mechanically exciting another resonator and putting some of that energy back into the bridge, without powered amplification, adding to the acoustic energy in the room and reinforcing resonances; it might help reduce the heft of the soundboard, allowing a louder, longer excitation.
Admittedly, setting it up to pull the bridge might be a royal pain in the buttocks, but he should deffo explore getting the signal into springs, attached to a soundbox.
If you play a guitar with a sprung 'trem,' without plugging it in, you can hear the springs reverberate.
Perhaps you could run an array of PT2399s off a signal,, a micro controller running an algorithm, but that's hardly the same thing
@@kaisersozeh7845 Perhaps the bridge can be supported by an actuator, which might sit similarly to the sound post in a violin except it would be able to lengthen slightly and drive the bridge mechanically.
Here's an idea: some strings have a significant amount of nickel, right? If you pass the string through the center of a coil, you could use the magnetostrictive effect as either a pickup or as a driver/actuator. The same could perhaps be done with a tuning peg as the "core" of a coil.
Since you know the frequency of each string, you could use a pulse width modulator (PWM) to drive the coils instead of sensing them. You need a sensor on a guitar (eBow) to figure out what note is being played, but in a drone instrument like this it isn't necessary unless you re-tune it, but I think the PWM parts will take a voltage input so you could put a pot for each coil to tune the driver to each string. You'd still need the amplifier circuit but not the input coil.
This whole series is awesome! Awesome sounds, great information, and really funny! Amazing work
Really cool project!
This is dope. I love how it sounds. I can imagine (perhaps unrealistically) a piano-ish instrument powered not by hammers, but by individual sustainers on each string, which you activate with a keyboard. Very cool project--thanks for sharing!
Cool! A homemade E-bow harp!
Awesomesauce my friend! I feel your struggles - a few weeks ago I rewound the coil on a balanced armature speaker/sound powered phone, matching the original as best I could. Fixing that thing had me missing the PCB rework I used to do under a microscope.
Lovely stuff! It just won't get very loud. But, given this isn't wind driven, and you won't need to accommodate a performer, you can throw out the Greek plans and play with the form to prioritise acoustic amplification. Couple of principals from 20th C guitar design - I only half remember, am not a luthier.
Keep the resonating soundboard as thin as possible, a curve will help with strength - but curves are hard.
The bridge needs to transfer energy from different 'impedances' of acoustic energy, so as thin and hard as you can at the string, without breaking the string, embedded firmly in something broad and flat that moves with the soundboard.
Opposite the bridge, keep the (hard) nut as fixed motionless as possible, let the bridge do the work.
The angle that the strings drop away from the nut and the bridge can be important, but I can't remember why...but as you are playing with form, maybe leave enough length to have a resonant frequency?
Keep all the sensors and actuators as far from the middle of the soundboard, in particular the sound hole(s) as you can
You can have smaller holes, of differing sizes. This might help with the placement of parts and keeping enough strength in the soundboard.
What you make the box out of, essentially, doesn't matter, as long as it holds its shape and is bad at transfering the delicious energy inside.
What that shape is can get complicated, but you are thinking intersecting resonators with the string/bridge intersection at the center of each resonator. There is a smaller lobe, like the hourglass of a cello has a smaller bulb at the top, but I honestly don't know how and why it is constructed.
You might want to look at Dobro guitars, made of metal, designed to amplify acoustically, don't know how they work. Also, I am on a home made instrument group on facebook, maybe ask there?
What ever form it takes I would stick with the idea of concentrating the sound and projecting it one direction.
Looking forward to seeing where this goes, really interesting project.
Iron heart and all 😂
Awesome, thank you! That is really helpful!
@@MichaelKrzyzaniak just riffing, but as it promises to be quite quiet, would you consider experimenting with feedback?
You were saying you were hearing detail through a contact mic that you couldn't hear acoustically - and you enjoyed loads of reverb in post.
How about you fabricate a spring reverb, you have the means and the skills, take that electrically amplified signal and put into piezos - not on the sound board, but perhaps embedded under the nut?
You might be able to avoid runaway feedback but still use the amplified signal to drive the oscillations.
Exposed springs are always a plus
Sorry man, last one. It might be simpler to amplify it for a spring reverb, but instead of a transducer at the end, you attach it to another soundboard in another box. You can then (grossly) control feedback by moving the reverb box closer and further away, or by changing the amplification into the spring.
Thanks for reading!
@@kaisersozeh7845Interesting ideas, I hadn't thought about this but it does make sense given how I have been thinking about the sound. I might have to try some stuff out. Thanks for watching!
For the instrument box, maybe better wood (pine?), or at least nice pine sides. You could look at how bracing works in acoustic guitars - maybe this helps with sound, I'm not sure. For the saddle and bridge, find some hard wood maybe. Good luck!
Thanks! Yeah, I'm going to try pine for sure, I guess plywood isn't known for its excellent acoustic properties, doh!
Hold that thought...
I came to this series and have sent my colleague here for a reason.
Stay tuned (no pun intended)...
try piezo elements... they work both ways. and theres actually a huge range of different transducers available.
you dont have to mount them at both ends the same way?
a plain under-bridge strip pickup, and individual cylinders under the "fixed" end of the string... run a filter circuit on the feedback loop, random noise generator controlling frequency and bandwidth(q) so only one string pulls into resonance at any time... iunno...
somewhere i have an old piezo based reverb unit... uses strips flexing to twist the spring somehow. bit fiddly!
spring reverb use "torsional wave" transmission. reduces outside influences. seems unrelated but interesting to know...
theres three waves in a string. transverse, beam, and torsional. they arent necessarily harmonically related! imho, its why certain scale lengths and string gauges work, whereas others dont...
you can wriggle it up and down. the obvious "wave" of any stringed instrument. that itself breaks down into two components, XZ and YZ planes. one parallel to the bridge or "soundboard", one perpendicular. strings really "gyrate".
you can bang on it end wise. the not so obvious wave at the speed of sound in the string itself reflecting end to end...
and you can twist it. this is an interesting mode...
theres other factors as well...
placement of the pickups!
stretch the poles of your pickup out with soft iron to be on both sides of the string, especially the exciters? but remember theres a nasty thing called "magnetic quench" when the fields TOO strong! that also may play a vital role in the overtone content... where the signal is being injected into the string... and thats why i prefer the piezo idea... can get it right in at the node of ALL harmonics, the fixed mount...
a guitar pickup can always be mounted lengthwise, one per string... "single coil" humbuckers have really nice thin coils... i wound my own pickups years ago on bits of filed down hacksaw blade... worked quite well!
I absolutely love this. I have all sorts of ideas while watching this, but lack the knowledge to execute them. But as a long time ebow and sustainer pickup player, I wonder how this would sound with wound strings (E A Ds from a guitar set). My experience is the wound, slightly larger gauge strings are more magnetically enthusiastic, at least initially. I mean, they usually are quicker to react than single wire strings. The downside is, they can get a little unwieldy with too much power, but the random harmonic overtones can be super cool! ps. I'm really digging my metal marsh mic....i think I need another for stereo recording.
Yess! I just discovered this yesterday, I was playing around with my 7-string and the low strings go crazy. I definitely want play around with this some more! I'm glad you like the mic
*******Reverberation NATURALLY could be achieved by placing 2 to 6 lengthy springs (tunable/tighten/loosenable at one end of anchor and placing the lot withing the Larger Sound Body of instrument. I've done this to a few of my Acoustic Guitar builds!. To also help this Journey look at the Science of vibrations of a string and how it breaks up into it's overtones etc. the best production to these vibrations are dead center between nut and bridge(half distance of string). Guitars are obviously limited of it's strength due to the fretboard double octave being in the way of play area. Of course, until we guitarists develop a sustaining system that can utilize a miniaturized and amplified DRIVER P.U. via Utilizing the Fret as the P.U. Slug which is located half distance between both the Nut and the Bridge. Lastly....for any Guitarist the Driver response in such a setup could pose problematic when playing Further up the neck and beyond the double octave area!*******
There's a piece of me that has been missing for several years. You remind me what that was, Mike. There is more to life than scaling the social ladder... I hope we can work together again soon.
The only reason I even make these videos is because I'm trying to goad you into driving your lazy ass up here so we can hang out!
@@MichaelKrzyzaniak Haha, that might actually be working.
For me it was very surprising how much there was multiple strings vibrating at once, even if it wasn't too audible without the contact mic. It sounded really nice. Maybe that could be tuned and/or controlled with some filters. The filters might not need to be too complex (basic 1-pole 6 dB/octave could work well enough) and phase shift they cause might have as big impact how it affects the feedback as the damping of the frequencies outside the passband.
For building better and more resonant instrument, you might what the instrument builder channels here on youtube. It's another deep rabbit hole though. At least with guitars the acoustic volume of an instrument seems to be a bit of a balancing act between the volume and sustain. If you take energy from the vibrating string to be converted to vibrations of air... Well there will be less energy on the string to continue vibrating. Luckily, you are using an external source of energy to keep it vibrating.
One thing that might also be nice is to ad asmall speaker or acoustic transducer to the instrument and feed it only a heavily reverb-processed signal. That way you could some of that ambience you had on the recording straight from the instrument itself.
Hey, thanks for the cool ideas. Filters would probably work. I've thought about doing that digitally as well - obviously that is an entire separate set of challanges, but it could be interesting to play with. The speaker idea is good too. I have some friends who put surface transducers on the back of guitars and played processed guitar sounds out of them as part of an art installation. It sounded really good! I might play around with it.
Fuck yeah!
Why did you lower the pickups when you could have raised the strings?
STOP with the "COMPUTER" crap & learn to play the harp. No Algorithm's. Cool you re-wound your own pick ups, though.