Well, I can resist no longer :-)
For a couple of years now, I've been thinking about this phrase, that ebony increases the sustain of the fundamental (partial).
Just to get the indisputable stuff out of the way first, ebony is awesome. Especially on a bass, though I have no reason to think it would be less so on a guitar. On a bass, it definitely supports the fundamental on the lowest notes.
Typically, without a bunch of ebony in play, these lowest partials die out early. But as has been reported here by Mica, based on oscilloscope observations by Ron, you can actually watch the first and second partials on low bass notes play with each other, in a reinforcing way, that increases the sustain, and contribution of each. (I'm not going to search for the references, but they should be easy to find.)
I'm pretty sure I can actually hear this, and have no doubt that it occurs - at least when playing low notes on a bass. So the nagging question is this: how does the ebony know whether it is dealing with the fundamental, or some other partial?
I submit that the answer is: it can't possibly know this. Its molecular structure is not sufficiently complex to support even the most generous notion of consciousness, and it would take considerably more than that to distinguish a fundamental from some other partial, and then in turn respond somehow differently.
Now, I can sort of vaguely imagine that there might be some curious property of the wood cell structures in ebony, that behave in a fairly unique way when responding to vibrations from the fundamental and second partial. One might imagine that the cell structure responds to this factor of two in an interesting way... though while I can imagine a factor-of-two response, I still don't see any way that it could detect a fundamental.
Nevertheless, even if such a thing did exist (which I find extremely doubtful), I simply cannot believe that it would occur over a wide range of frequencies. So what I tend to believe at the moment, as a working hypothesis, is that ebony just happens to be a really dense, stiff wood, that does not resonate very much at low frequencies. It doesn't care whether it's dealing with a fundamental, or some higher level partial, it is just going to stand up to certain frequencies.
I have no idea how high this goes. I would guess it is somehow special up to at least 200-300 Hz (conveniently covering nearly all of the funamentals we play on bass), and possibly quite a bit higher than that. If I were considering a custom guitar, it would have at least one or two ebony neck lams (okay, three, maybe with mahogony fillers).
Just to be clear, I don't think I'm disagreeing with anyone here. Yes, it does increase the sustain of the funamental, but I think that's only because it happens to be good with lows (without knowing whether it's a fundamental). As Mark says, it seems to apply to all of his strings, including those that some of us bass players would consider silly-thin. So again, I'm inclined to think that ebony helps with sustain over a very broad frequency range, including the guitar zone, and it just happened to get noticed because it did so well in the very low end of basses - and somewhat erroneously labeled as helping out the low fundamental.
As you can probably tell, if you've read this far, I'm very curious about this, and would be interested in pursuing it. I think it's relevant to the original question, not a hijack :-)
-Bob
