Sustain - good or bad?

One of the styles I like on the uke entails the use of campanella which appears to be most effective with increased sustain. I'm not any good at it, but really enjoying listening to someone who is.
 
I didn't start learning flamenco techniques until I picked up the ukulele. Just to see what it was like, I grabbed a classical guitar (not a good one), and the 8-finger roll was SO much easier! This was absolutely, definitely due to the huge body of sound, much of it due to sustain. I had been wondering about a flamenco styled ukulele, but I think as some people have mentioned, a ukulele AT BEST has very little sustain. I think it's probably too easy to take our guitar thinking and just shift it over to this little instrument which is so different in some very important ways.
 
This got me thinking, so I roughly measured the sustain on three ukes, all soprano scale.

Banjo uke - when playing, feels like almost no sustain at all.

Solid mahogany - average uke sustain

Spruce top/mahogany - when playing, feels like it sustains hugely.

My rough numbers are 3, 4 and 5 seconds. I expected something like 2, 4,and 6.

So the differences are really quite small, but the effect when playing is very marked.

Surprising!
 
ProfChris' thinking got me thinking.

Let's say you're playing 1/8 notes (quavers). You're playing at 100 beats per minute. You will be playing a note every 3/10 of a second. If you play a half note (minim) it will last 1.2 seconds. I haven't encountered too much music which uses longer notes for ukulele. But maybe that's just me.

So, if you play an arpeggio on all 4 strings, with 1/2 notes, the last note will sound after the first note has been sounding for 3.6 seconds.

So, firstly, the smaller number of strings probably means you NEED less sustain on a ukulele versus a guitar. The guitar technique where you want lots of sustain is pedal notes, where you play a low note and other things on top. A guitar naturally does that better than a ukulele. Might need to explore that from a composing standpoint. Hmmm.

The other issue is, of course: how much sustain and where? A note on the 11th fret doesn't sustain like an open note.

I suspect that the important thing about lots of sustain is actually the resulting slow decay. You want to retain sound energy from previous notes.

This is hardly scientific, but I think there are a number of factors which make less sustain AS USEFUL for a ukulele as the correspondingly long sustain of a classical guitar. The job each needs to accomplish is on a different scale.
 
You can finger- or palm-mute to dampen sustain when desired. There ain't no way to put sustain in that ain't there to begin with!

That's a long winded way of saying - "too much sustain is still not enough!"

John
 
The more the better. More sustain helps people to sloooooow down and make more dynamic music.
 
I figured this topic might generate some interesting replies. Someone had asked me about it in relation to strings, and I had also been giving it a lot of attention in regards to sound on our new instruments.

One thing I learned a long time ago, was not to try to make things "for the market". It's not that this is a bad idea for some people, it's just that I personally have always had a hard time nailing down where the market is. I always make what I like, and figure there will be others who like that too. Just the same, now that the designs are set, I thought to take a look at what people here had said about the topic. When I searched, I was surprised to see how little discussion had occurred.

The "depends" answers are the ones I like best - I put "Good or Bad" as the topic for simplicity's sake. Roy Smeck, for example, would probably go mad trying to play some of his stuff on a nice Devine or Compass Rose Tenor. He was more than a pretty good player, but not a fan of "slow".

Most of us are not playing Smeck style - nonetheless, it seems to me that there actually can be too much of a good thing. Tudorp gave an example of an instrument that I don't think could be played well through fast passages. There were references to damping - but again, that takes time.

Rick gave a pretty good description of our new instruments: "stiff sides & back - cedar top (though some will have spruce) - long sustain". The way we build our backs gave me the chance to dial it back just a bit. A long way from banjo sound, but at least out of the annoying aspects Tudorp mentioned.

There were some questions about strings, specifically nylon strings by Ralf. I do think traditional low density nylon strings are a good choice for lower sustain, and yes, I also think they tend to have a bit more of what I would call "meat" on them than flourocarbons.

We use nylons in some of our sets for the high note strings. If you are just buying varied diameters, one thing you can do with nylon, is fine tune your sustain. No other material changes more in this regard depending on tension. Give it some slack - get a nice sustain. Put some tension on it and you can make it drop dead in a heartbeat.
 
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