Experimenting with three different brass wires

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October 18, 2014

Last April I did some experiments with different brass and bronze strings on the 5-string kanteles made by Billy Horne. Now I made some new experiments with the Suojärvi replica (#1 in the previous experiment) in which the sound box is made of birch, the top plate of spruce. Suojärvi päältä ja pohja_rajattu In this experiment I tried three different brass wire on it (all from Malcolm Rose), and tuned it a semitone higher than earlier.

Just tuning a bit higher (from A3 flat to A3) made the sound apparently better. In addition to the wire I used in April – English Brass 0,40 mm – I also tested Red brass 0,44 mm, and English brass 0,44 mm.  The string #4 broke twice: first with the 0,40 mm English brass as I was raising the pitch, and the same happened again with the Red brass. One reason for breaking might also have been in the sharp edge of the varras:Suojärvi replica_varras (800x533)

In the next video you can hear all three sound samples. It has been very interesting to hear comments which differ strongly from each other. Of course it is natural that individual preferences may differ totally, but it is also worth pondering whether we hear what we expect to hear? How much does the things that we see have an effect to what we hear? Perhaps you should listen to the sounds without watching the video first.