Question about braces

[Matthew Tucker]

Originally Posted by Eric Rene Roy

I'm not sure if there has been any Chladni studies on bass plates the way they do violins...but I have to imagine the bend making a pretty big disruption to the lines of the plate.
Thoughts?

my be wrong but that thesis "round back vs flat back" floating around a few years ago probably did this.

My thoughts on this are that chladni patterns of a braced bent plate would probably be just as good/bad as an unbent braced plate, except that the the plate would be effectively shorter. But that said, you're not going to easily get the common modes 2 and 5. And it all changes when you attach the rim of the plate to the ribs, eh.

I'll try to find a picture of the chladni pattern of my ladder-braced bent back on my first bass. As I recall it was almost a perfect circle mode centered around the lower bout. Above the C's there was very little resonance at all, perhaps if there was no break there would have been a circle mode there as well at a higher freq. But what they all mean ... that's the big secret isn't it?