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I thought both will age the brass. Sulphur is what does it when using hardboiled egg recipe but there's low levels of both in healthy urine...but we need a chemist.
Didn't think of the socket for the contact mics, but the distances edge of body to center of hole seem to be identical 2 inches. So a bigger hole for the Altamira tailpiece will do.
(At least I hope so.)
Just drill out the bottom hole in the tailpiece so the jack socket goes through it (if you have a step drill bit that's the best and easiest), then you can secure it with the nut. As long as they match close enough, just make the top screw holes wherever they fall and let the tailpiece bend the way it wants.
Went to one of my favorite music shops in Hamburg today, Musik Rotthoff, to buy some saxophone reeds for school use, and to have some talk about the archtop guitars in his store (old German brands, and a 1937 Epiphone tenor guitar). We inevitably ended up in a discussion about tailpieces and afterlength, and he kind of frightened me with the serious warning that changing the afterlength of my gypsy mystery guitar would probably have a bad influence on the intonation.
When I was back home, I immediately called the guitar maker I trust, but Karsten had customers in his shop and had no time at all for telephone counseling. So I scrolled around in the old tailpiece-thread in this forum (and in some others, I admit!), but did not find anything about impact on intonation.
Help!
No way it can impact the intonation... What's his explanation?
He said that it would have an impact on the harmonics (which I knew) and thereby on the intonation (which I find hard to believe). That different tailpieces can change the sound to an audible amount is quite obvious because of different materials/weights/sizes/lengths. I replaced the frequensator tailpiece of my Epiphone archtop with a trapeze tailpiece of "normal" length, and this again with a shorter one, and no intonation problems occured (can't talk about changings in sound because I restringend with different brands each time). But the elder Mr. Rotthoff is a very experienced music dealer (see video below), and he warned me so insistently that I walked out of the shop with the idea of a guitar that would, in all its fresh beauty, be unplayable. Now, back home, with a warm meal in my tummy and my guitars all around me, I begin to feel more secure again.
(The Epiphone archtop tenor guitar I mentioned in my "Help!" comment can be seen right behind that blueish-greenish guitar in the middle of the top row. The guitar is not for sale, the Rotthoffs lend it out for commercial shots etc.)
If the break angle of the strings over the bridge is relatively flat, I suppose when you fret a note you might be very slightly pulling the string over the bridge -- affecting the string tension, and therefore the pitch. So, if the "afterlength" is different, this might possibly affect the (miniscule) amount that the string moves over tbe bridge, and therefore the tension and therefore the pitch.
Imagine pulling on a string with zero afterlength (like a pin bridge on a flattop), vs. pulling on a string with a long afterlength.
Also, some tailpieces -- like on GJ guitars - have a fixed angle, while trapeze tailpieces float up to aim at the top of the bridge. And then there's the height of the tailpiece off of the guitar top ....
The break-over angle, string after-length, and any movement of the tailpiece (some float, c.f., cello) - these all have some effect on string tension and thus tone, there’s a lot of info out there on it especially in the classical bowed instruments world. I’ve done quite a bit of fiddling with after-length and tailpiece pressure on jazz archtops- you can indeed feel subtle differences.
WRT Intonation though, meh, I posit it’s (a small change in after-length) pretty much of negligible tonal effect on GJ axes with typical bridge heights and actions.
After lying around at the customs in Frankfurt for a whole week, the tailpiece finally arrived. I think this was worth waiting:
Old one:
New one:
Tomorrow I will change tailpieces with my old guitar after visiting my luthier, there has a bigger hole to be drilled into the Altamira tailpiece and I can't do that by myself.
Hey Willie, does it sound better? Did it bolt on without issues? It looks pretty nice!