Tunborough wrote: ↑Tue May 02, 2023 3:26 pm
RoberTunes wrote: ↑Tue May 02, 2023 5:59 amWith electric (and certainly acoustic too) guitars, the various wood types and construction designs have various responses to the vibrational energies of strings.
I don't think it is reasonable to compare guitar fabrication to woodwind fabrication. With guitars, the strings are physically vibrating, and transferring energy to the pickups and the body. The material of the body will inevitably affect the transfer of energy. (See "impedance matching".) With woodwinds, only the air column needs to vibrate. Any transfer of energy from the air column to the body is incidental. and at least in the case of Terry's pine Prattens, that transfer of energy is detrimental.
The topics of guitar and whistle design/fabrication are directly related for the issue of understanding how materials of the instrument affect tone. It's a simple physical process in action of a certain energy pattern being put into a physical body which responds in its own way to those vibrational energies, and feeding back that response as an ongoing active physical behavioral influence into the ongoing energies within the instrument, whether that energy is within the vibrating air column in a whistle/flute, or the strings vibrating on a guitar. It's the same active feedback process going on. As long as the sound source is being created, the wind across the blade or the string still vibrating, the material hosting this process has a presence affecting the resulting tone. For this topic, there's no difference between any instruments of any kind, actually, it's present in all instruments; drums, keyboards, flutes, all brass instruments, all violins/cellos, all bass guitars, even the human voice has tonal character effects associated with variations in the structure of the upper chest, mouth, nasal cavities.
As an interesting diversion, there is an old topic of discussion amongst electric guitar manufacturers about what material(s) would produce closest to 100% pure translation of the original string vibration to the pickups. The idea of making a guitar body out of 100% 5-inch thick solid steel came up, bolted to a thick concrete floor, as well as ideas such as 6-inch thick solid marble, but the general idea is that there's no way to do it, and the real joy of musical design is to go the other direction; working with the options for tonal response you get when blending that source energy with the response you get from the materials and designs used to make the instrument. This has produced some wonderful results amongst all classes of instruments (think "Stradivarius"). For electric guitars, the semi-hollow guitars have an amazingly rich tonal response (the best in my opinion, for tonal response). Hollow bodies are resonant but can tend to be nasally. Solid bodies have their own issues, and adjusting the materials, designs, string thickness, scale length, electronic control specs, etc., all have their role to play. Paul McCartney's famous Hofner bass design (the Violin bass Hofners typically have a hollow body) has a different tonal response than a solid body Fender Jazz bass does, their bodies and neck have very different materials and designs, and subsequently in tonal response. The Gibson SG and Gibson Les Paul are both mahogany bodies, but of quite different body thickness and dimensions, and the tonal response is VERY different between those two mahogany guitars. To me, the thick-body Les Paul is rather muddy and bassy when playing chords, whereas the SG is a tonal Tyrannasaurus Rex, I love the range of very rich sounds I can get out of SGs, they're clear and powerful, the guitar is famous for being resonant and it's body is quite thin. So ultimately, the aim in guitar design is to get materials and designs that work well in harmony WITH the range of musical frequencies in play, rather than trying to create a tonally transparent instrument, which is impossible. Once an electric guitar is constructed, the remaining ways to change the tonal response typically rely on using different pickups, using different components for volume/tone controls, improving the bridge or buying very good EQ and "signal boost" pedals which affect tone after it's left the guitar pickups.
With whistles, the size, weight, materials and design of the body come into play to affect tone. The heavier, thicker body (and maybe wall thickness too) of a low F or low D whistle will be responding in a different way to the vibrational energies of the air, than the high D whistles would in the same model, because the material response has changed, even if it's the same brass used in all. This is why a buyer can't expect a low D of one model to sound exactly like the high D of that same model, for tonal response. It will seem close, but there is a variation in play. Changing the wall thickness, weight, hole sizes, etc., all changes tonal response. Changing length of the tube changes tonal response. These things are inescapable physical processes in play.
The only instrument class that could escape this feature of body feedback affecting tone would be electronic instruments such as electronic synthesizers or keyboards with electronically produced tones, but the physical object/energy feedback process would show up again as soon as you start using physical amplifiers with wooden enclosures, different materials for speaker cones, speaker size, etc. Anyone who has shopped around for amplifiers for guitars, keyboards, vocals, bass, etc., would have realized that design and materials (case wood thickness, speaker size and materials, case resonance characteristics) would have been immediately exposed to this topic by default, even if they weren't quite aware of it yet, the more professional-focused amplifier manufacturers talk about it all the time. A lot of precise technical analysis of amp speakers and enclosures is available online. Manufacturers always promote the ability of their speakers and amps to generate purity, richness and accuracy of tone, and options in design and materials help, hinder or customize that, such as how varying the diameter of the speaker with the same materials and design will affect tonal response, regardless of volume. Sometimes an amp is a legend or popular for having a certain way to slightly colour the sound, and there are a few major classes of such amps. Those would be popular picks amongst players seeking to stay within certain areas of musical style, such as small combo jazz, classical, big band arena hard rock, folk performers in small cafes on Saturday afternoon, clear vocals, violins, etc.
This topic is an endless garden of variety.