EVESTAFF

[Delwin D Fandrich]

Maxpiano@aol.com wrote:

> ....  I had a flashback when Baldwin came out with their "Electropiano" that had the
> action under the keys, trichord unisons and the tuning pins sticking out the
> back.  I was working for a dealer that sold them.  I'm thankful not to have
> seen one in years.
>
> Bill Maxim, RPT

--------------------------

Bill,

I installed and maintained a couple of sets of these for the music department of a local
-- Portland, OR -- university. Once you got used to them they really weren't bad. To tune,
that is. The action was a mistake by nearly every criteria. Later, I got to know the
engineer who designed it (invented it, actually) quite well. He was just as disappointed
with its performance as were the rest of us. But you see, it was never intended to be a
vertical action. It was invented, and was originally intended, to be used in a grand
configuration having a similar string/transducer arrangement. In that configuration, it
worked quite well.

Baldwin had hired a music educator consultant who convinced the management that what the
world needed was this music lab thing. And that Baldwin was just the company to build it,
what with their expertise in electronics and all. I never met this consultant, but she was
a woman of rather short stature. And she insisted that she be able to see over the top of
these pianos and look into the eye of all those little six-year-olds. Hence the 30" O/A
height of the instrument. That height requirement, of course, dictated designing an
entirely new instrument from a relatively clean sheet of paper. No CAD computer screens
then. Along the way, some management genius learned of this new stamped metal action that
Baldwin held the patents on and the rest is history. (It didn't seem to matter to anyone
that this was really a grand action -- that's what engineers are for, isn't it?.) That
height requirement also dictated putting the tuning pins in back. If an O/A height of 32"
or 33" would have been acceptable, the whole thing could have been built using fairly
conventional components. This product, however, was being designed primarily by marketing
and sales.

The basic concept of replacing the entire soundboard assembly with a series of transducers
was, to me at least, an exciting one. I was able to study the technology fairly thoroughly
for a time. I thought at the time that it had a lot of potential in real musical
instruments. I still do. But, like a lot of other interesting innovations, the failure of
its first major application determined its ultimate fate. It now rests in the scrap heap
of piano history.

Regards,

Del