Hacker News Reader

Comment by louhike | Hacker News Reader

I suspect it is hard to achieve the acoustics of an instrument traditionnaly made of wood with plastic.

Thinking of it, I don't remember hearing an instrument made out of plastic which sounded nice even though I'm a musician. I'm not saying it cannot be done, it is just not common for now.

View on HN

Depends how you define "plastic". There are a number of really nice carbon fibre fiddles in the "serious" price range that may give up a teeny-tiny fraction of the absolute best that can be achieved with the best woods, the best varnishes, the best luthiers, the best alignment of the stars and the correct sequence of profanities and vulgarities uttered during the production process, but for that minor loss you get excellent instrument-to-instrument consistency and the ability to play with the same sound under wildly varying conditions of temperature and humidity. Part of the problem with acceptance is that once the price gets high enough, people want "a real one", and Cremona never smelled much like carbon fibre.

Boosey & Hawkes used to make a wonderful series of woodwinds (clarinets and oboes) in aligned glass-fibre-reinforced resin with the same sort of advantages - and disadvantages - with one extra little niggle: they weighed a bloody ton. (I owned a B&H clarinet I haven't picked up in a little over 20 years. There's still a discernible dent in my right thumb, something one never got in a persistent way from wood or the student-oriented plastic or Bakelite instruments. Much nicer sound than anything of wood at twice the price, but I can understand why they didn't sell too very many of them.) I'm sure they could do much better now, at a cost - but then there's the acceptance factor to deal with. At least ebony has problems associated with it that spruce and maple don't so far; it will probably be easier to accept good synthetics over bad or hyper-expensive wood before too much time goes by.

The material used to build an instrument is not very important for the sound, at least for wind instruments. See http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/0708/roncone-0708.html for instance.

Some professional French horn players playing with a mouthpiece on a garden hose : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOpWKgLzxQ4

The only professionaly used plastic instruments I have seen are recorders and flutes. Although no serious recorder/flute player would prefer their sound they can be quite good, especially because they are tuned higher than normal recorders which are tuned way to low. (This is why they sound so bad when playing with other instruments.)

I habe also seen tubists use acrylic mouthpieces.

Jack White famously plays/played a plastic guitar, and got, in my opinion, pretty excellent tones out of it, but (a) you're asking about "acoustics," which don't apply in the same way with an electric guitar, and (b) his tone is/was produced almost entirely by his amps and pedals.

Could it be too expensive?

A good, precise injection mould is many tens of thousands of dollars, and several are probably needed. That's a lot of upfront cost for a low volume product.

Nah, it's just physics really. If you're making an instrument that's traditionally made of wood, and the sound of wood is your cultural reference point, then the plastic/<$SYNTHETIC_MATERIAL> version is not going to sound as good.

It may even sound fine in it's own right, out of context, but it'll almost never be 'the same' as wood. I think that's really the heart of the issue.

EDIT: actually, on the expense issue, these days manufacturing of musical instruments has gotten so good (especially in the east), that the cost of making a 'good' instrument has fallen through the floor. Today we can get perfectly usable (or even very nice) instruments at prices that would make musicians of yesteryear weep.

Those ovation acoustic guitars with the plastic bottoms and carbon fiber tops are pretty good.

Ovation guitars are ridiculously desirable items amongst musicians I know.

At first glance I thought you were saying Ovation made violins and I was going HOLY CRAP WANT :-)

A kazoo comes pretty close

I guess those new plastic trombones and trumpets are pretty good.

Prhaps the alto recorder.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com