[CAUT] More on Single String Beats

[Jeff Tanner]

On Apr 16, 2007, at 3:45 PM, Ken Zahringer wrote:

> Wayne Stuart uses a device he calls a “bridge agraffe”. ...in fact  
> Sohmer used these devices many years ago.  I suppose it didn’t  
> catch on then because other manufacturers saw it as “their” idea,  
> not “ours”.  With modern manufacturing techniques, surely they  
> would be less expensive than the labor-intensive process of  
> drilling, notching, and pinning a bridge, and would seem to offer a  
> better termination as well....Does anyone have any experience with  
> these agraffes?  Is there a downside to them that I don’t know  
> about, other than inertia in ideas of how a piano is supposed to look?

I tune a couple or three old Sohmers around town with the bridge  
agraffes.  One was restrung by someone else (now deceased) - and not  
everything is like I would have done it :-).  The others are all  
original (and yes, all pre-1920).  It is difficult to say whether I  
particularly like what I hear.  The rebuilt one has rock hard hammers  
that are difficult to voice and we really don't focus on it as if it  
were a performance venue instrument.  It's in a country church 20  
miles out of town.  But the musicians there are quite competent (one  
is on staff here at the school of music), and they love the piano.   
There are a lot of metallic sounds in there that disappear when you  
get in the top section that doesn't have agraffes.  The top section -  
with standard bridge pins - is quite nice actually.  They also  
improve some if you can get a needle in the hammer any depth at all.   
But there is also either falseness or otherwise difficult to tune out  
noise in many of the agraffed unisons.  I'm guessing the rebuilder  
was not likely to have known to dress those old agraffes before he  
restrung it.  Whether or not that would have made much difference is  
difficult to know.  I believe the bridge agraffes also have  
"upbearing" rather than downbearing.  Perhaps it is because the  
soundboard is 90 plus years old, but the tuning on that old piano  
stays rock solid.

The other couple of similar Sohmers here in town had very similar  
tones through the bridge agraffe range, even with 80, 90 plus year  
old hammers and strings.

Looking to the violin for clues that obviously inspired piano design,  
I suppose if a metal bridge termination would produce desirable tone,  
the violin would have moved to that years ago.  But they'd rather  
have a piece of quartersewn maple that's been sitting in a garage for  
50 years shaved down as a string termination.

I think there may be something to the statement someone made earlier  
about those false sounds creating desirable piano tone, and it is  
something I noticed not long after I began here almost 9 years ago.   
Of the two Steinways we have here, both finished within a couple  
hundred numbers of each other, the one everybody likes is the one  
with the most "falseness" in the singles, though they don't realize  
it is there.  Even with the new hammers, much more mellow yet than  
the originals, it has more "color".

Jeff


Jeff Tanner, RPT
University of South Carolina



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